3D printers turned on in the schools thanks to the artisans

“If we want to diffuse digital culture, the way chosen by the artisans of Varese can be a model to export.”  If Riccardo Luna, Italian digital champion, gives you the green light, this means that the way paved by the Confederation of Artisans of Varese is going in the right direction. The man who above all embodies the word digital in Italy refers to a model that needs two things: on one hand, a new business vision, essential to lead the old manufacturing system into the digital manufacturing made of 3D printers, open source software and clouds. On the other hand, a system that supports it through targeted interventions, appropriate industrial politics and a training across the board.

The problem, needless to say, is the second thing, that is the country. We are not referring to broadband and, least of all, to the infrastructures, but rather to the lack of a ruling class that knows what we are talking about when saying the word “digital”.

As anybody knows, the entrepreneurs do not like to waste their time but they get to the point. Those from Varese, moreover, are the quintessence of concreteness, so that they earned a quote (“Te set andre a laurà” –you are going to work-) from the song “O’ scarrafone”, old hit of the Neapolitan singer-songwriter Pino Daniele. Working hard, however, is not enough anymore, they need an added value. “We need to make a literacy action among the enterprises, because they are not ready for this change, while the young people can be the natural protagonists of this passage because they have the digital in their DNA,” says Davide Galli, president of the Confederation of Artisans in Varese and engineering entrepreneur.

Therefore, the “Faberschool”, presented by the Confederation of artisans, starts from the immediate need of spreading digital culture among young people, because only in this way we can give continuity to the manufacturing sector of this area. The directors of the association set in Via Milano perfectly know that the glory of the past is not going to be enough to support the enterprises’ balance sheet nor to guarantee the representative system.

This is an awareness which, in few months, has turned into the opening, for the area, of Faberlab, a digital factory in Tradate, and the introduction of 3D printers in schools. The seven institutes (Isis Newton in Varese, Isis Valceresio, Padre Monti in Saronno, Liceo Scientifico Galileo Ferraris in Varese, Liceo Scientifico Marie Curie in Tradate, Enaip in Busto Arsizio, Itis and Ipsia Ponti in Gallarate) which accepted the project of the Confartigianato will house in their IT laboratories the “Sharebots”, given by Comingtools, a company guided by young entrepreneurs, partners of the initiative, while students and teachers will be trained in the Faberlab. In the last years an idea of schools, that did not help the transition, dominated. Mr. Galli defines it as “ lyceumisation of the choice”, this is a term which wants to unmask an inexistent classification in the imaginary of young people at the moment of the choice of the type of school. If we gave the floor to the main character of the novel “Heart”, he would simply say “work never soils”, because the fact of learning a profession, which maybe does not exist yet in the reality, in a technical school is not less noble than attending a lyceum. The Faberschool marks a path which can also count on the official blessing of Local Director of Education Office of Varese, sanctioned by a suitable protocol, and by an outing as much important. “The business world and academic world have difficulties in dialoguing with each other,” admits a manager of the director of education office, “ so it’s necessary that the formative profiles do not depend on pretentious ministerial programs.”

The schools connected via videoconference with Faberlab (except for the students of Marie Curie in Tradate that, to go to the digital factory of the Confartigianato, only need to cross the road) show their first prototypes churned out by 3D printers. There is someone who tests themselves in the classic realization of a whistle and someone, like Professor Potente of the Isis Newton in Varese, who brandishes in a triumphant way, a connecting rod of a motor, which has been thought, designed in the computer and printed at school. His satisfied smile is the one of who knows that from this point we cannot go back.