(upbeat music) - STEM and science and math are so important in today's world.

You see more and more industries in our own region involving things like robots and coding every single day, and so the goal is to be able to teach them that problem solving, working together, but also the ability to work independently.

- We go off deeper into the sort of makerspace, really super science stuff like 3D printing, lasers.

We have a Wazer and things like that.

So where you can actually make and learn things that are part of industry.

So there's a couple different ways you can approach 3D printing.

If you really want to do the work or you wanna do something custom, you create it in the computer on the screen until you think you've got it.

You build that slowly but surely with shapes.

So here's a cylinder.

We pull a cylinder in and we can use the tools to set the height and the size and the rotation and all of that, and you add shapes together one by one to create what you want for your final outcome, and you take that file in whatever way you can, you get it to your 3D printer.

That can be a thumb drive, it can be on a network, can be a lot of things, and then you start the 3D printer doing that, and what it does is takes a a plastic filament, many different materials available, draws it into the head, melts it, and squirts it out in a little pattern on the table that eventually builds from the bottom up in layers, your 3D design, and there's a lot of things about that, the density, whether the inside is filled or solid or hollow, that kind of thing.

What the structure is, what the material is, all the temperatures, and it makes your creation on the table.

(upbeat music) Laser engraver cutters do two different things.

They use a laser, in this case it's a CO2 laser.

So CO2 lasers are applicable to things that you can set on fire.

That's basically your standard of guessing is, can I laser this?

well, will it set on fire if I put it in the campfire?

Yes.

Okay.

So with that, you have kind of the same thing.

You have a computer program where you generate your graphic and you have to decide between two things, engrave or cut.

Again, you get your graphic to your laser however that is, put the material in the bed, you set the focus because how far you are from the laser's critically important, and so then you start your burn and hopefully you learn a few tricks along the way.

So I've got our work material lined up on the bed of the big laser, again, ready to do this.

And so the first thing we do is we go into the screen and we go to the function and we choose auto focus down here and hit enter.

And auto focus is gonna raise the bed or the Z-axis until it touches the sensor and then it's gonna back down away from it the exact correct distance.

And you can verify that with the focus light there.

The little red dot is right under the laser head, so we can tell that it's the right distance away.

It uses a little parallax to do that.

The laser head is straight up and down.

The focus light comes from over here at an angle, and so when it's the correct distance, they cross.

So then we'll close the lid because you can't run this one with a lid open because it will sever limbs.

(upbeat music) So our piece is done, so we're gonna open it up and we're gonna see if I still have a job or not.

So there's the boss's folder with a nice lightly engraved Re-Imagine logo.

So with laser, we actually have two different lasers here.

We have the large format, more industrial laser that's a little harder on the front end in the software.

You have to kind of have a real good knowledge of what you're doing and know a lot of the factors about it.

We also have a smaller laser that's branded as the Glowforge and that's getting popular in the makerspace world.

And that one is super easy to use.

Of course the capabilities are lower and smaller.

It's less power, it's a smaller bed size, all of those things, but the interface for it is super simple.

It's a webpage, basically.

You go there, you drag an image into it or you drag an outline into it.

You can get a lot of that stuff off of Etsy and other places like that.

And poof, in just minutes you can unbox this thing and be lasering on a small scale.

Nice, neat little thing.

(upbeat music) The Wazer's interesting.

And that again, is one of those things where Becky came in and said, "Hey, I've got an idea," and I'm like, "What is a Wazer?"

And then I saw it and we did an online demo with it and I'm like, "We have to have a Wazer."

It's really cool.

So Wazer is a brand name or a branded name for water jet cutting and water jet cutting, again, is important because it's used in industry for a lot of things.

Industries have been cutting on large expensive water jet cutters for maybe a decade or two.

The Wazer brings that to a scale that a lot of us can have or at least someplace like the museum can have it around, so you can come in and touch it.

And it literally says in the intro to it, it cuts anything which I find, I'm like, "Ooh, it cuts anything."

But it uses high pressure water, much like a pressure washer, and then it adds in a little bit of real fine sand that has sharp edges, an abrasive material, and it mixes those two together and shoots it at your material at an extreme rate of speed, and then that will trace out and cut out a pattern in whatever you put in there.

So you can make an image or a shape, a pattern on your computer, send it to this thing and it'll cut it out with great precision.

And I'm gonna pick the logo, Re-Imagine, and there's a few steps.

Prepare the machine to cut it.

Yep, that's sure what I want to do.

Lift the nozzle clear of any obstructions.

So you manually lift the nozzle up so that there's room under it.

Okay.

I've done that.

And what it's gonna do is it's gonna hone itself now.

So it's gonna find the starting corner and calibrate itself and make sure that it's good to go, and then I'm gonna choose cut material and it's gonna tell me to close the lid and then we press this to start it.

Now, this one is noisy and messy.

Here we go.

(machine whirring) The mistakes I made here, you can see.

It's a little overcut in areas.

It isn't really ready to break completely out, but it came pretty close for a first try.

But that's part of STEM, STEAM, and the fun of learning is you work through those things one iteration at a time until you get it.

(upbeat music) - We spoke with teachers.

When you come to this facility, what sorts of lessons would you like your kids to take away from it?

What sorts of opportunities are you wanting us to provide?

It also reinforces many of our area schools have lasers.

Many of our area schools now have 3D printers.

What something like this at our local museum offers is the ability for a teacher to give an assignment now.

You go and print this project, you go and create this piece.

And it challenges students to learn a little bit on their own without maybe a teacher looking right over their shoulder.

- [Announcer] Funded by the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund, with money from the vote of the people of Minnesota on November 4th, 2008, and by the members of Prairie Public.