The Hand Challenge

I couldn’t write anything until today because this last week has been extremly exciting but also exhausting. The 3D printing summer course has been a complete success and soon we are going to appear in the national TV!!

Let me start from the beginning though. As I told y’all ladies, I was hired by my university to organize a 3D printing summer course for high school girls to encourage more women to persue a technical career (in Spain we are less than 20%). The course took place a couple weeks ago (4-8 July) and we wanted to do something big. That’s how we decided to take part in The Hand Challenge. 

The Hand Chanllenge is a wordwide initiative from Dr. Chris Craft that challenges classes from all around the globe to 3D-print, assemble and ship to the US a prosthetic hand. From the US, the prosthetic hand will be sent to a children in need.

It’s a great idea because the kids do not only learn about prosthetics and 3D printing which as a biomedical engineer I find extremely interesting but also see the social impact of their work and motivates them even more. In our case, it had a double goal since it was meant only for girls, to encourage them to study a technical degree later on.

The girls were splitted in two teams and worked very hard to built their prosthetic hand. One of them it’s a Batman hand, like the superhero, because prosthetic kids rock! The other one is inspired in the Disney movie Frozen and you really feel like a princess wearing it.

Here is a picture of me, in the middle, with the Frozen team.

More than 7 countries and 76 classes have already taken part in the challenge but we are the first class in Spain and the second class in Europe to complete the challenge. I couldn’t be more proud of my girls! What else can I say? Bravo!

But I’m not the only one who thinks these little ladies are amazing and the proof is that the national TV has come to interview us all. We will be appearing on TV any time soon!