Fab Educators Summit 2026: Innovation from China -- Integrating Maker Culture and AI & STEM to Advance Educational Equity

SHANGHAI, Feb. 3, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- On January 30, 2026, the Fab Educators Summit successfully brought together innovators and practitioners from 19 countries to explore how digital fabrication and artificial intelligence (AI) technologies are transforming education. 54 speakers shared practical insights, challenges, and classroom projects online, supporting a global audience of educators from 79 countries.

During the summit's eduFAB online seminar, case studies presented by two leading Chinese innovators demonstrated distinct yet complementary pathways for leveraging technology to advance educational equity.

Mushroom Cloud Makerspace: Expanding Rural Access to AI & STEM Education Through Maker Education

Rebecca Jiang, Operations Manager of Mushroom Cloud Makerspace—a leading FabLab hub in China—presented a talk titled "Empowering Rural Students Growth Through Long-term Collaboration." She detailed a field-tested partnership with Spring Organization Public Welfare, a youth-focused NGO. Their collaboration has successfully introduced AI and STEM education to K–12 schools in rural regions, including Guizhou and Yunnan, using a replicable co-building framework. This model focuses on creating inquiry-based learning spaces, developing project-based maker curricula, and providing low-barrier tools that transform advanced technology into accessible creative media. From 2023 to 2025, the program delivered over 11 major activities, reached 10 schools and more than 1,000 students, and mobilized 12 volunteer mentors, providing sustained support across multiple provinces over several years.

A key component of this collaboration is Mushroom Cloud Makerspace's support for Spring Organization's ETS Conference, a decade-old public welfare initiative for rural students. Since 2022, volunteer experts from Mushroom Cloud Makerspace have been integral to integrating AI and STEM contents into the conference. Building on the long-term partnership established between both parties, and through the adoption of easy-to-use programming platforms and hands-on hardware tools, structured AI and STEM courses have now been extended to more rural schools, ushering in a new phase of sustainable impact.

DFRobot's 'Ski Adventure' AI Workshop: Training AI Models Through Creative Activities

Jiaman Li, Senior Technical Trainer at AI-driven STEM education solutions provider DFRobot, led a popular 45-minute online workshop titled "Training AI Models Through Creative Activities." Using the "Ski Adventure" pose-recognition game as the core activity, participants were guided through the complete process of building their own motion-sensing interactive system step by step. Centered on pose recognition technology, learners used the MindPlus V2.0 programming platform to go through the full development cycle—from defining skiing movement categories and collecting personal pose data via camera (suggesting 150-200 image samples per category, while the software displayed real-time collection counts), to training a personalized classification model and deploying it for real-time game control.

A key highlight was the workshop's data-driven design philosophy: participants continuously improved model performance by refining the quality and diversity of their datasets, gaining an intuitive understanding of how data shapes AI behavior. With MindPlus V2.0 programming platform supporting self-trained models, the workshop turned abstract AI concepts into an accessible, hands-on, and highly teachable learning experience. Ethical considerations, including algorithmic fairness and data privacy, were embedded throughout the session; for instance, learners examined inclusivity challenges by observing how recognition accuracy can vary across different body types and age groups when using the same model. Ultimately, the workshop went beyond technical skills, turning AI into a tangible, reflective, and responsible creative practice.

The Fab Educators Summit 2026 showed the successful Chinese models from its eduFAB workshop. It demonstrated that sustained collaboration among maker spaces, EdTech firms, and public partners can effectively integrate AI/SETM/Maker Culture into classrooms even in the rural places worldwide. These tools foster student creativity, problem-solving, and responsible tech awareness in real-world contexts.

SOURCE DFRobot