3-D Printing Helped These Teens Build a Smarter Wheelchair

January 8, 2015

(Wired) – Sixteen-year-old Mohammad Sayed wanted more from his wheelchair. So he started hacking the thing. Sayed is a student at NuVu, an experimental high school in Cambridge, Massachusetts where students learn practical skills through hands-on projects, and for one his projects, he used a 3-D printer to transform his wheelchair into something more useful. He and his classmates added a laptop tray and a canopy, and, most radically, they rebuilt the chair so that Sayed could propel it with a rowing motion rather than the traditional push.