Iowa City Press-Citizen, June 2, 2014
The state’s first Fab Lab, a digital fabrication laboratory packed with manufacturing and electronics equipment accessible to the public, will host a series of youth camps this summer as it nears its opening.
The STEAM Room Fab Lab is organizing three electronics day camps for junior high and high school students in a temporary location at the Iowa City Marketplace, formerly known as Sycamore Mall.
The two-week camps are designed to help teens build skills through hands-on work and experimentation rather than sitting at a desk with a pencil and math book, said Kirk Cheyney, the STEAM Room Fab Lab’s founder.
“We aren’t focusing on math or equations or any of that stuff,” said Cheyney, an Iowa City engineer. “What we’re doing is guiding kids in sticking things in other things and seeing if they blow up or not. One of the first experiments we do is actually touching your tongue to a battery and making yourself a conductor. So we go from ‘what is electricity?’ to the third level, which by the end you’re literally building your own robot.”
Read the story by Josh O’Leary at the Iowa City Press-Citizen