Antigo High School Fab Lab: Makerspace continues to see high community use

December 20, 2024

ANTIGO — After seven years in operation, career and technology education teachers say the Antigo High School Fab Lab has been growing in popularity among community members in recent years, following a dip in visitors.

The Antigo High School Fab Lab is a makerspace with a wide variety of tools. While the Career and Technical Education department uses the Fab Lab for classes with high school students, the department also opens its doors to the community most Thursday nights.

Dave Kuhr, a technology education teacher at the high school and the Fab Lab director, said community members are allowed to come into the Fab Lab to work on their own projects. The department also started holding special event nights, which have been gaining traction recently.

The Fab Lab has available to community members large-format printers, vinyl cutters, laser engravers, 3D printers, routers, a CNC mill and lathe, hand tools and computers for design work.

Community members have made all kinds of personal projects, Kuhr said, everything from charcuterie boards to stickers, posters, decals for cars, wood engraved items and more.

The Fab Lab has been growing in popularity in the last few years, Kuhr said, after visits to the Fab Lab dropped in 2020 and 2021, due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Since then, Kuhr said he’s been trying to get more community members in the door of the Fab Lab, to get back to pre-pandemic participation rates.

“Right before COVID happened we were finally getting to the point where we had a regular public use of the fab lab,” Kuhr said. “We’ve been trying to build that again since then.”

New the last two years, Kuhr has started organizing community workshops where different CTE teachers lead project classes, teaching community members to make a wide variety of art, wood or food projects. Previous classes have included canvas print-making, vinyl sticker-making and creating decorative porch pots.

Kuhr also said the Fab Lab hosts a charcuterie board making class at least four times a year, because it’s so popular. The class is split into two sections, one involving making the actual wooden charcuterie board, and the other with participants learning to make chocolates and arrange actual food items in charcuterie presentations.

The classes often pull in other CTE instructors from Antigo High School, and cover multiple disciplines, Kuhr said.

The next Fab Lab maker series class is Thursday, Dec. 19. Participants will be using a laser cutter to make Christmas ornaments, beginning at 5 p.m. at 1900 10th Avenue in Antigo.

The goal of the Fab Lab open nights and classes is to allow community members to gain a better understanding of what the CTE department, and Antigo High School, has to offer.

“Part of the purpose of the fab lab is to get community members in to see the facilities, because a lot of people don’t know what we have,” Kuhr said. Open Fab Lab nights let “them see how their tax dollars are being spent” and get a “better idea of what’s going on, what the needs are, (and) how things are being used.”

Opening the Fab Lab to the public also allows community members to create projects they wouldn’t be able to make otherwise, Kuhr said.

“It’s also for people to be able to get access to things they don’t normally have,” Kuhr said. “Your average person doesn’t have a $25,000 CNC router. They don’t have that in their house.”

Opening the doors of the Fab Lab gives community members access to established machinery. Another big draw of the Fab Lab for community members is software, Kuhr said. The Fab Lab has educational subscriptions to Adobe Creative Cloud, 3D modeling software and other programs for design work.

“Because we have that, that’s something community members don’t need to pay extra for at home,” Kuhr said.

Opening the Fab Lab to the community has been a practice that’s been going on since the Fab Lab opened in 2017. In April 2017, Gov. Tony Evers visited the AHS Fab Lab and designated April 25 to be Fab Lab Day each year. Antigo wasn’t the first community to build a Fab Lab, Kuhr said, but was close to first.

Kuhr said that anyone interested in coming to the Fab Lab to independently work on projects should email him.

The Fab Lab is open to the community most Thursdays, depending on the school district calendar, Kuhr said. If participants are interested in using other shops, like the wood shop or metals shop, they should reach out ahead of time to confirm schedules.

Kuhr said the schedule of open Fab Lab nights is posted on the school district website, along with contact information, material fees and machinery offerings.

There are fees associated with certain materials or projects, which can be found on the district website also.

No experience with the machinery in the Fab Lab is required, but Kuhr said that if community members have never used a particular machine before, they should come in on a night when additional training is offered, like a maker series event, or a night when staff are available to train.

Kuhr said community members receive the same safety training that high school students do while working with the machinery, and supervision early in the process is important.

Kuhr said he tries to host makerspace events at least once a month. Participants should sign up for those workshops in advance through a Signup Genius link on the district website. There is a fee associated with workshops, to cover supplies, and pre-registration is necessary to anticipate supply needs, Kuhr said.

More information: antigo.k12.wi.us.

ORIGINAL SOURCE: Madeline Westberg for the Antigo Daily Journal, December 17th, 2024.