The Fab Foundation is pleased to announce that Adam Savage, editor-in-chief of Tested.com and former co-host of the Emmy-nominated show “MythBusters,” will be making a stop in Pittsburgh on a national tour designed to visit and document innovation in education, entrepreneurship, and workforce development. Sponsorship is provided by Chevron, as part of the energy company’s continuing commitment to STEM education. Started in response to the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy “Maker Initiative,” Mr. Savage aims to engage and excite the communities he visits and then document the tour on video for the entire country to share in the experience via multiple media channels, including Tested.com.
Pittsburgh has been selected as the next community in this national tour due to its growing footprint of Fab Labs and makerspaces, and its unique community-wide collaborations for learning, such as Remake Learning. Mr. Savage will visit a number of spaces including the Elizabeth Forward School District, the Intermediate Unit 1 Fab Lab, the Carnegie Science Center Fab Lab, Carnegie Mellon’s IDeATe@Hunt, University of Pittsburgh’s Human Engineering Research Laboratories, 7800 Susquehanna, and the Children’s Museum Pittsburgh’s early childhood makerspace. “Sharing the important STEM education work originating in Fab Labs and makerspaces is key to our mission,” explains Sherry Lassiter, President of the Fab Foundation, the umbrella organization for a network of over 1,000 Fab Labs around the world.
An avid inventor and cross-disciplinary visionary, Mr. Savage aims to inspire support for the next generation of inventors, engineers and entrepreneurs through a two-day visit on Oct. 5 and 6 with philanthropists, students from K-12 through graduate school, educators, and makers of all ages. Mr. Savage shares the Fab Lab view that makerspaces are a safe place to fail, and recognizes that: "What 'making' as a discipline engenders is the importance of iterative mistake-making and how failure and ‘wrong turns’ aren't the outliers, they're the standard. Failure is intrinsic to success. If we don't let people fail safely, and help them understand how much there is to learn from their mistakes, then we are training a generations of perfectionists, obsessed with test scores instead of learning."
For more information about this national tour and the work of the Fab Foundation contact Sonya Pryor-Jones, Chief Implementation Officer at sonya@fabfoundation.org