Frankie’s New 3D Printed Hand

Please click on the photo above to be directed to a video of the funniest 7 year old e-NABLE hand recipient to date!

This is the kind of story that we hope to see more and more of.

Meet Frankie, a 7 year old little boy in Massachusetts who was born with no fingers on his right hand and his Mother Rachel, who found her way to the e-NABLE community after watching a video about a father and son pair (Paul and Leon McCarthy) who created a 3D printed hand together.

Rachel joined the Google+ group and introduced herself and explained that she was in need of a device for her son. Within minutes, she had volunteers offering to make one for Frankie and one of those volunteers just happened to be 8th grade science teacher Jourdan Marino at Marshall Simonds Middle School in Massachusetts. Jourdan realized they were near one another and was eager to get an opportunity to teach his students about 3d printing and the good it can be used for.

Jourdan says, “I feel personally, that it’s critical the students know that I could walk along and all of a sudden this could cross my path and with the support of another person, we could do something…we could create something, that could potentially be life altering.”

They worked together with Kevin Kille, the tech ed. teacher at the school and tried a variety of designs before choosing the Ody Hand design for Frankie’s first hand. The Ody Hand design was created with just two fingers and a thumb to help give younger children a chance to build up their wrist and arm muscles before working up to a full five finger design which takes more force and muscle power to leverage the fingers to close.

It is stories like this that fuel our nearly 1000 e-NABLE volunteers excitement to continue creating and designing and sharing these files!

Oh and…This story isn’t over yet!

It is actually just beginning!

Frankie may have recently gotten his new hand…but now an entire classroom of 8th graders have gotten to see what 3D printing can do…and they have now had first hand experience in creating something with this technology that has changed the life of a child. These kids and their teachers are not going to stop with building a hand for Frankie.

This experience will have no doubt impacted these students in ways they may not even understand yet and you can bet that they are not only going to be even more excited about this new 3D printing technology, but they are going to realize that they don’t have to stop at just making hands…if they can think it….they can now prototype it and can you  imagine what kind of creativity lies within these young minds?

Who knows what they might invent that could very well change the World.

If you are a teacher or a student and you would like to know more about the e-NABLE group, get help in putting together a hand for someone on our wait list, learn more about 3D Printing, get a kit of parts sent to your classroom so that you can put one together to see how it works or if you have any questions and would like to have one of our volunteers get in touch with you – please email us at info@enablethefuture.org and join our Google+ group here!