For eight years I taught STEM and digital fabrication at the Museum of Science and Industry, and built its only makerspace program dedicated to high-school students from Chicago's under-served communities.
I taught students from age 8 to 90 how to design and build real objects: 3D printing, laser cutting, vinyl cutting, CNC machining, and the computer-science fundamentals underneath them. I built 3D printers. I taught people how to measure, how to operate the machines, and how to turn an idea into something they could hold.
The work I'm proudest of is a program I created and ran from the ground up over three years: the museum's only "making" program built specifically for high-school students in disadvantaged areas. Most of the students had never set foot in the museum before, let alone been part of lasting programming inside it.
3D printing from design to finished part, including building and maintaining the printers themselves.
Laser cutting and engraving wood, etching onto metal, and CNC machining. Measurement, tolerance, and safe machine operation.
Vinyl cutting, digital design, and the computing fundamentals that connect an idea to a fabricated object.
Designed the program end to end and secured donor sponsorships through the museum by writing the proposals that funded it.
Partnered with Chicago community colleges so students earned credit during the school year that applied when they enrolled after high school.
Students received free lunch and public-transit passes that lasted the full school week, so getting to the program never competed with getting to school.
Sessions ran four to five hours, long enough for students to actually build, iterate, and finish real work.
The majority of participants were Black students, and many were young women. The program held the best sustained attendance the museum had seen for anything like it. That number was the whole point: when you remove the barriers and teach something that matters, students show up, and they keep showing up.
I ran this alongside founding and building my cybersecurity company, TechBreakdown, holding both for much of each tenure. It was the last major thing I built at the museum before moving to security full time.