Free 3D Hands

A teenage boy looking under an electric magnifying lens, focusing intently on soldering the wires on a microchip.

Free 3D Hands STEM Design Thinking Teaching Resource

  • This program, aimed at Grade 2 through to Year 8 students, will focus on how people interact with the world in different ways and will be a free resource for schools across Australia. Dr Loz will write the curriculum in conjunction with content and feedback from Free 3D Hands. The program will be aligned with the current curriculum and freely available for any teacher to download and use. This will give more teachers/students the opportunity to experience the science and humanity of Free 3D Hands.

  • The main premise of the written curriculum/program is asking students to identify a task that people with different abilities may find challenging and then invent a solution that will assist them to do this task, using creative design thinking.

  • The students will learn about effective brainstorming, rapid prototyping, and allowing for soft failures as a necessary path towards a successful solution. Students will learn to embrace mistakes and flaws in their designs and take on feedback and information they need to continuously improve their designs and present their prototypes to the class through some form of recontextualisation (eg: video/play/interview etc).


The ‘Free 3D Hands’ logo. ‘FREE 3D HANDS’ with a blue hand shaped icon that also resembles a microchip.

About Free 3D Hands

Free 3D Hands is an Australian charity who design and 3D print hands and assistive devices. The hands are provided for free, to children and adults all around the world and CEO Mat Bowtell freely shares his designs under an open-source licence so that others can create and repair their own devices, encouraging further innovation.

Free 3D Hands goal is to significantly bring down the cost of assistive technology to help those who currently cannot access or afford it.