This Wednesday, we officially start our second year of Studio H with 13 new students from Bertie County. We’ll be teaching, like last year, 2 blocks per day, for a total of 3 hours of the school day. Our students are juniors from the Bertie Early College High School, and will earn transferable college credits this semester. Because the farmers market construction from last year bled into the fall semester, and also because of scheduling limitations for students, we chose to condense this year’s program into one intensive semester. We’ll still be building large scale projects (culminating with our “Super Stands” project – small farmstands that double as community bulletin boards for the outlying towns in Bertie and tie back to the Windsor Super Market “hub”), and will still be building cornhole boards (though we’ll do mini-cornhole boards for elementary school math classes).

We’re also excited that this semester, we will be using a laser cutter for rapid prototyping of models, in addition to more analog hand-built models and the usual slew of wood and metalshop tools. The laser cutter was generously donated to us by Autodesk, to whom we are eternally grateful for enhancing the capabilities of our program and our students. The image above shows a quick example of our initial “tinkerings” on the laser cutter – small rulers made from the old middle school’s bleacher wood, etched with our motto, “Design. Build. Transform.”

Students, see you on Wednesday! Get ready to get dirty.