Inspired by Saint-Exupéry, faculty member Carla Diana creates a beautiful children’s book utilizing 3-D printing.
Inspired by Saint-Exupéry, faculty member Carla Diana creates a beautiful children’s book utilizing 3-D printing.
Kids today are raised with clay and Playdoh, but the children of tomorrow will have a vastly more sophisticated tool available to turn the stuff of their imaginations into something they can touch. How will these children of tomorrow learn just what 3-D printing can do? LEO The Maker Prince is a new book by designer Carla Diana that aims to inspire a new generation of makers.Published by Maker Media, Inc, LEO The Maker Prince owes a debt to Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s 1943 children’s classic, The Little Prince. “When I set out to write a book sharing my own excitement about the future of 3-D printing, I thought about what a strong impact certain books have had on my life,” says Diana. “The Little Prince stood out to me, particularly for its message about creativity and keeping an open mind.”Like that book, LEO The Maker Prince features a prince from space who crash lands on Earth and then befriends the book’s narrator after asking her to draw a sheep. Then the story takes a decidedly 21st-century twist. The prince of this story takes the sheep drawing, scans it into its memory banks, and prints out a three-dimensional model of it, initiating the narrator (and the reader) into the world of 3-D printing.
