Gregory Shechter noticed something most people walk past. In classrooms at nine different LAUSD middle schools, some students could not sit still, and it was working against them, not for them.
He was a freshman at Palos Verdes High School at the time, already several years into a habit he picked up in sixth grade: designing things on a computer, then printing them into existence. That year, he turned the habit toward a specific problem. He designed a 3D-printed fidget tool, meant to give restless hands something to do without pulling attention away from the lesson. Then he printed five hundred of them.
The fidgets went to nine schools across Gardena, Carson, San Pedro, Lomita, and South Central Los Angeles: Peary, Steven M. White, Andrew Carnegie, Richard Henry Dana, William Johnston Community Day School, Edwin Markham, Glenn Hammond Curtiss, Caroldale Learning Community STEAM Academy, and Alexander Fleming. A month later, he collected feedback from the schools. Students reported calmer hands, less impulsivity and anxiety, and better focus.
Something else happened too. Kids started asking how the fidgets were made.
“I was really excited to hear that some students became curious about how the fidgets were made, sparking lots of questions about 3D printing,” Gregory wrote, describing the response.
That curiosity is what he decided to build on. Now a sophomore, Gregory hopes to offer after-school workshops at the same nine schools, working with the psychologists, principals, and assistant principals who partnered with him on the fidget project the first time around. He is bringing along a few friends from his robotics team to help teach. The plan is two or three lessons per campus, starting with Tinkercad, a free CAD program, and the basics of how a 3D printer works, then moving into more advanced designs as students get comfortable. He has also pointed out that many public libraries carry their own 3D printers, so students without one at school will still have somewhere free to bring their designs to life.
This is not new territory for Gregory. In eighth grade, he built PillBot, a project that caught the attention of Society for Science. Since then, he says, he has kept designing and printing things meant to solve real problems. The fidget project, and now the workshops, follow the same instinct: notice something that isn’t working, then build a way to fix it.
Running workshops across nine campuses meant Gregory needed equipment he didn’t have, so he wrote to LumenSparQ asking for help covering a portable 3D printer and filament. LumenSparQ didn’t send a check. Instead, it delivered two gently used Prusa 3D printers, printers that had themselves arrived at LumenSparQ as a donation from Westside Neighborhood School, along with about fifteen spools of filament to get the workshops started.
No one nominated Gregory for a LumenSparQ honor. He found us on his own, the same way he found a problem worth solving: by taking action.
Sometimes that is enough.