BY THE OPTIMIST DAILY EDITORIAL TEAM
In 2022, a group of high schoolers designed 150 LEGO-inspired airplane kits, 3D-printed them one by one, assembled them by hand, and shipped them to a school in Kenya. How is that for a nonprofit origin story?
Student Makers was founded in California in 2019 and got its 501(c)(3) status in 2026. Nearly everyone who runs it is a teenager. The instructors are former participants, students who completed the program a semester or two earlier, which is how a teen-run organization manages to offer free workshops in 3D printing, Python, data science, physics, financial literacy, and Arduino programming across the US while keeping active partnerships going in two other countries.
From California to Kenya: building more than skills
The school that received those airplane kits, Kenya Relief Academy in Migori, serves about 800 students from first through ninth grade, 170 to 190 of them orphaned. It is the top-ranked primary school among more than 800 in its region. Since that first shipment, Student Makers has donated a 3D printer, an Arduino kit, and more than 400 slides of curriculum, logged 60 hours of live teacher training, and worked directly with more than 30 students. One team of four built an autonomous agriculture rover and placed third at the Kenya Science and Engineering Fair. One of those students, a ninth-grader named Jacob, now leads the school’s robotics team and wants to be a rocket engineer at NASA.
“You are a game-changer,” said Ruth Agongo, a teacher at Kenya Relief Academy. “Whatever you have taught us, we are putting into action because the kids are really excited by the technology.”
The same pipeline, applied across borders
Since 2023, Student Makers instructors have run live 3D-printing classes by video call with students at Dr. R. V. Shah English Medium School in rural Gujarat, India, a school of more than 350 students. The organization donated a 3D printer, and more than 25 secondary students have completed the program.
The US workshops run on the same framework: Learn, Make, Showcase, Serve. Students who finish are trained to teach the next round. Six rounds of 3D printing have reached 70-plus students. Three rounds of Python and data science have produced 12 projects and more than 1,200 lines of code.
What’s coming next
Student Makers is part of the Youth Technology Corps Global Alliance, which has connected schools across eight countries since 1998. Next up: three underserved schools near Mexico City, and a project to help Kenya Relief Academy students use their donated 3D printer to manufacture medical-grade face shields for the school’s on-site clinic.
“Every child deserves access to quality STEM education, regardless of where they were born,” says Dilan Mehta, the Georgia Tech student who founded the organization’s Georgia Tech chapter.
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