Growbox from an Old TV: School Students Present Their FabLab Projects at the City Youth Forum I Create the City of the Future

On December 7th, 2018, the NUST MISIS FabLab Center for Technological Support of Education hosted an exhibition of school projects dedicated to urban environments.

Students presented their projects as part of the youth forum “I Create the City of Future”.

The Center for Technological Support of Education is a part of Moscow’s Department of Education, where Moscow school students create their own projects on a variety of topics — from household items and decorative elements to engineering structures and robotic systems — with the help of digital production specialists. The Center operates at the NUST MISIS FabLab.

On December 7th, 2018, as part of the “I Create the City of Future” forum, students from Moscow schools who were enrolled in classes at the Center presented their projects dedicated to creating a comfortable urban environment.

All the projects were devoted to one of four topics:

— layout and urban planning;

— city farming;

— plastic recycling;

— ceramic printing.

“We adhere to the upcycling principle — re-using waste and old materials. We are presenting the Growbox project — a device to ‘smart’ grow houseplants in the frame of an old TV. We have automated systems of irrigation, heating and lighting for the plants. We worked in Fusion 360 for the design, and then we used a 2D milling machine and the FlexiCAM machine. In the future, we are planning to connect the Growbox to WiFi [to enable] remote control”, said Ani Khachaturyan, Agata Gafarova, and Kristina Shamonova, the inventors of the Growbox project and students from School № 1234.

Other notable student projects presented at the forum were concepts of a residential building focused on energy efficiency, a concept for an all-terrain vehicle controlled by electronics, models of wind turbines with an electric generator, a cultural center, a museum city complex, and an extrusion device that turns plastic waste into a thread for 3D printing, among other things.

The forum also had mini-lectures, master-classes on 3D printing, and themed games.

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