You Can Learn a Lot from Lydia...the 3-D Printed Lady

The subject this week is 3-D printing, coding, and creativity...but first I'd like you to meet someone: The little doll on the left is Lydia. She belongs to my daughter.

Lydia also has a friend named Vivian...you can see them below left. (Lydia is wearing a yarn wig my daughter made for her.) My kid and her friends are 12 years old and obsessed with these dolls, which they design themselves online.

Why is this relevant? These MyMakie dolls are 3-D printed in England from the designs their owners create. (Go try designing one, it's fun and there's no obligation.) They are fully articulated, balanced perfectly so they can stand without falling over, and have detachable replaceable parts. (Lydia and Vivian switch eyes fairly often.) Viewed close up, their skin, which comes in one of many colors you choose from, is just a bit rough, like expensive parchment stationery, and you can see the slightest bit of layering. But they are sturdy and playable just like any other doll.

Cheap? Ha. No. They cost over $100 each, and my daughter spent all her Christmas and birthday money on these girls. But they have given her hundreds of hours of creative crafting enjoyment. She made the house you see in the top picture and the "secret garden" in the bottom picture as well as many clothes. In fact, she has learned to use a sewing machine, all because of these dolls. And because she loves photographing them, they have their own Instagram.

3-D printing is an amazing technology that we only dreamed of just a few years ago. Before 3-D printing, kids could imagine, dream, create, sculpt, anything they cared to invent. But they had no way of duplicating their designs. 3-D printing allows you to design and create an item, test it, alter the design, and create it again, almost effortlessly.

What on earth does this have to do with libraries? That's a valid question. Traditional print formats (unless they are pop-up books) are two-dimensional. Presentations, research, even computer screens are all two-dimensional.

But the world of the imagination is in 3-D. To be able to create an exact replica of something you design is a perfect example of "authentic intellectual work," learning by doing. Increasingly, with information readily available in any room of the school via the Internet, and books ever so slowly moving to digital formats, the library is not a quiet place of silent reading but an active laboratory of learning. 3-D printing, though in its infancy, is a great addition to that laboratory.

Coding, too, is authentic intellectual work. My son spent thousands of hours on Scratch as a young boy, learning how to code because he wanted to create something. You want to make that picture of a cat dance and sing? You have to drag and drop the commands in exactly the right order. He would open up other people's projects, study the code, and edit them to make them his own. He readily embraced the learning curve because he was creative, not because he wanted to learn to code. This is an important distinction for me--you don't decide to learn to play the piano because the piano's mechanism is fascinating, but because if you do it right, you make music.

In the library, as technology leaders, we have to make the right tools available so that students can follow their creative urges to their conclusion. If we provide tools like 3-D printers and opportunities to learn to code or program robots, we can change those wistful "I wish I coulds..." to "Oh wow, I can actually do that!"