My seven year old has been saving his money for the past year. What is he saving his money for?
A 3D printer.
He has talked about printing LEGO sets, toys, action figures, and his most ambitious project — robots. He doesn’t want to build one robot, either, but an entire fleet of robots that will do all of our work so we can play Minecraft all day.
I’m all for it.
It sounds a little silly at first, but I imagine that by the time he is an adult — or sooner — 3-D printers will be fairly common and affordable. I remember when color printers first came out — dot matrix even — so I am sure we’ll make just as much technological progress with 3-D printing as we have with color printing.
Leo the Maker Prince
A recently read a post about a new book that has captured the magic of 3D printing and presented it in a children’s book. Titled, “Leo the Maker Prince,” it “owes a debt to Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s 1943 children’s classic, The Little Prince.”
Author and designer Carla Diana says,
“When I set out to write a book sharing my own excitement about the future of 3-D printing, I thought about what a strong impact certain books have had on my life. The Little Prince stood out to me, particularly for its message about creativity and keeping an open mind.”
This charming story does not stop at words and pictures, it takes interactive books to a whole new level. If children have access to a 3-D printer, they can download files to print out the characters from the book:
Can you imagine reading a book as a kid and then being able to print out the accompanying action figure?
This takes the concept of interactive books — like what we have seen with books written for the iPad — to a whole other dimension, the third dimension!
It would be awesome if the Church would do with this. Let’s pack-up the Sunday School flannelgraph and make some 3-D printables!
(You can purchase Leo the Maker Prince from Amazon.)
[via Fast Co.Design]
[…] longer we have ebooks the more they will become robust and find their own way as a medium. Like the children’s book that includes 3D printables, ebooks will begin to include more and more content that paper books simply can not […]