Mouse is thrilled to work closely with MakerBot Industries, the pioneering force in 3D printing and replication technology for consumers. Mouse helps distribute MakerBots to schools who are eager to transform STEM learning with the support of their student leaders and the coordinators of Mouse programs.

We are honoring Bre Pettis, MakerBot Co-founder & CEO at Mouse@15 , an interactive event on May 20th celebrating Mouse's fifteenth anniversary (The Lighthouse at Chelsea Piers, NYC; 6:00-9:00pm) We are also thrilled to be honoring digital technology advocate Joanne Wilson and expressing our thanks to our longtime partners, including Best Buy Children's Foundation and the New York City Council.

Two weeks ago, MakerBot invited Marc Lesser, Mouse Education Director, and me to visit their new headquarters in downtown Brooklyn. They are on the 21st floor of a large, beige building full of traditional businesses (a utility company, the processing centers for several major financial institutions).

The elevator door opens (*ping*)...and I felt like Charlie going through the gates at the Chocolate Factory...no, like Dorothy when she stands on the porch of the downed house, surveying Oz for the first time...

We have been heralding the dawn of the New Economy for two decades now, so I will resist the urge for hyperbole...but I felt the future being made at MakerBot, or at least one of the future's underlying strategic technologies.

Founded just four years ago, MakerBot is transforming not only one sector of the economy, but also how we think about the economy as a whole, by returning access and control over technology to the individual. Combining the ability to manipulate the physical world with the digital tools to share that ability, will put economic authority squarely in the hands of millions, a decentralizing force that will re-invent how we envision, design, test and make both ideas and things.

In short: BYORS...Bring Your Own Ruby Slippers. If you don't have any yet, make a pair! Such wonderful magic: the ability for each of us to hammer out our own ideas in the fires of our minds, and then to swap those ideas quickly and efficiently with those beneficiaries, to meet needs, solve problems, grow the economy. 

Daniel Rabuzzi is Executive Director at Mouse.