Educational Program - Fab Academy

What it is?
The Fab Academy will provide instruction and supervise investigation of mechanisms, applications, and implications of digital fabrication.
The Fab Academy is a distributed education system, it will connect via video conference, and Internet, experienced professors with students located in Fab Labs of the world.
From a 30 week program to specialized certificates in digital
fabrication: The Fab Academy consists in the addition of certificates in processes about digital fabrication, the result of this addition is the "Fab Academy Diploma". Individual certificates could be taken independently of the entire program.

When?
Applications are open from January 20th to March 30th. The program will have two main cores of 15 weeks: September
- December 2009 and February
- May 2010. This completes a 600 hours program including:
- Weekly videoconference classes with international experienced faculty
- Personalized instructors locally placed in Labs
- On site tutorials
- Time in equipment operation

Where?
There are ten Fab Labs that will offer the Fab Academy program 2009-2010:
- Barcelona, Spain
- New Delhi, India
- Amsterdam, Netherlands
- Ohio, United States
- Boston, United States
- Oklahoma, United States
- Cape Town, South Africa
- Vestmannaeyjar, Iceland
- Lyngen, Norway
- Jalalabad, Afghanistan

Tuition and application
Tuition for the year 2009/2010 is 10.000euros.
Applicants should email to info@iaac.net the following documentation:
- Completed application form
- Letter of intent
- Copy of (valid) passport
- Curriculum Vitae
- A non-refundable application fee of 80euros, payable by bank transfer to:

Instituto de Arquitectura Avanzada de Cataluna
Bank: Caixa de Arquitectos
Account Number: 3183-0800-8200-0064-8636
IBAN: ES86 3183 0800 8200 0064 8636
BIC/SWIFT: CASDESBB
Note: in the bank transferring SUBJECT must appear the applicants name
All documents should be submitted in English.
These documents will be reviewed and will serve to determine whether you will be admitted to the program.
The selected candidates must send to the Fab Lab Bcn a scanned proof of a down payment of 2.000euros to confirm participation, before the 25th of March, 2009. The remaining part of the tuition fee (8.000euros) may be paid either in one two installments, 60%, both before 1st September
2009 and 40% before 15 February 2010.

Note: Please revise educational programs section at www.iaac.net and www.fablab.es sites for documentation to be updated soon.


The Fab Academy
Executive Summary
draft: July 7, 2008

The Fab Academy will provide instruction and supervise investigation of mechanisms, applications, and implications of digital fabrication.

Like the earlier digitization of communication and computation, the digitization of fabrication is bringing the programmability of the digital world to the physical world. The research roadmap is leading to the development of a universal replicator that will eventually be able to make almost anything (included itself), by programming the assembly of functional materials. Field "fab labs" are providing early access to these capabilities, through prototype tools for personal fabrication. They are analogous to the historical role of the minicomputers that came between mainframes and PCs; fab labs, like minicomputers, have a cost and complexity within reach of a workgroup, allowing their applications to reflect the interests of individuals rather than institutions.

The possibility that anyone can make anything anywhere challenges an assumption of scarcity that has been implicit in the organzation of advanced technical education and research. Research infrastructure that was once restricted to elite institutions is now available in a fab lab. The students and teachers that have studied in these institutions can now be connected by broadband video wherever they are. And the content in libraries can be shared through online repositories of research articles and instructional material. Instead of traveling to a distant campus, or connecting remote sites for distance learning from a central hub, a global network of local labs can itself become a distributed campus. This is the mission of the Fab Academy.

The Fab Academy emerged from the experience of students who had exhausted local educational opportunities and came to fab labs for informal, peer-to-peer, project-based technical education, mentored by a growing group of faculty from around the world. To meet this demand, the Fab Academy will initially focus on a vocational FAB diploma aimed at employment certification, then a Bologna-style Bachelors degree for specialized study, and finally post-graduate research leading to more advanced degrees.

The FAB diploma will cover relevant aspects of physical science, computer science, engineering and design, including materials selection and characterization, additive and subtractive fabrication processes, CAD/CAM/CAE, circuit design and assembly, sensors and actuators, embedded and application programming, networking and algorithms, as well as models for managing businesses and intellectual property. Study of these areas will be integrated through a hands-on project focus on producing functional systems, and be driven by the rate of skills progression rather than a fixed schedule.

Fab labs began as an outreach project from MIT's Center for Bits and Atoms; the FAB diploma is roughly equivalent to passing the rapid-prototyping course "How To Make (almost) Anything" at MIT. Fab Academy instructors will initially be drawn from collaborating faculty at existing educational institutions, however the accreditation for these degrees will be through the Fab Academy itself. Classes will be taught via networked video to students in fab labs around the world, with collaboratively developed online instructional material. Because there is no international accreditation, the Fab Academy will undertake applicable local and regional accreditation procedures, however the program content will be shared across these.

The Fab Academy in turn will work with the non-profit Fab Foundation to provide operational capacity to support invention as aid, and the for-profit Fab Fund to help global capital find local inventors and local inventions find global markets. Together, these organizations form an ecosystem to enable learning, living, and working in a world of personal fabrication.

The initial faculty participating in the launch of the Fab Academy include:

Dr Adrian Bowyer
Mechanical Engineering Department
Faculty of Engineering & Design
University of Bath
Bath BA2 7AY
UK

George Church
Department of Genetics
Harvard Medical School
New Research Building, Room 238
77 Avenue Louis Pasteur
Boston, MA 02115
USA

Dhananjay V. Gadre
Assistant Professor, ECE Division
Netaji Subhas Institute of Technology
Room-204, Block-4
Sector-3, Dwarka
New Delhi 110075
India

Dr. Kamau Gachigi
Lecturer
Department of Mechanical and Manufacturing Engineering
University of Nairobi
Kenya

Neil Gershenfeld
Professor and Director, Center for Bits and Atoms
Room E15-411
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
20 Ames St.
Cambridge, MA  02139
USA

Samuel Ginsberg
Lecturer
Room 4.13
Department of Electrical Engineering
University of Cape Town
Private Bag X3
Rondebosch 7701
South Africa

Debabrata (Debu) Goswami
Associate Professor
Department of Chemistry and Center for Laser Technology
Indian Institute of Technology
Kanpur - 208016
Uttar Pradesh, India

Saul Griffith
MacArthur Fellow
President and Chief Scientist, Makani Power
2175 Monarch Street
Alameda, California 94501
USA

Vicente Guallart
Director, Institute d'Arquitectura Avancada de Catalunya
Carrer de Pujades, 102
Barcelona, 08005
Spain

Behrokh (Berok) Khoshnevis
Director, Center for Rapid Automated Fabrication Technologies (CRAFT)
Professor, Epstein Department of Industrial & Systems Engineering
University of Southern California
Los Angeles, CA 90089-0193
USA

Hod Lipson
Associate Prof. of Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering and Computing & Information Science
216 Upson Hall
Cornell University
Ithaca NY  14853
USA

Marta Male-Alemany
Co-Director Master in Advanced Architecture
Institute d'Arquitectura Avancada de Catalunya
Carrer de Pujades, 102
Barcelona, 08005
Spain

Manu Prakash
Junior Fellow
Society of Fellows
Harvard University
Cambridge, MA  02138
USA

Daniela Rus
Professor of Computer Science and Engineering
Associate Director, Computer Science and  Artificial Intelligence Laboratory
Room 32-374
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
77 Massachusetts Ave.
Cambridge, MA  02139
USA

Larry Sass
Assistant Professor
Director, Digital Design Fabrication Group
Room 10-471M
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
77 Massachusetts Ave.
Cambridge, MA  02139
USA

George D. Sergiadis
Professor and Head, Telecommunications & Soft Computing Group
Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering
Aristotle University of Thessaloniki
Greece