The Department of Education’s Plan to Go Open—Open Educational Resources, That Is

In the early 1800s, Thomas Davenport, a poor, young, self-taught blacksmith in Vermont tinkered with magnets to create, and eventually receive a patent for, the first electric motor. Nearly 200 years later, middle-schoolers in Albemarle, Virginia, are tinkering with modern 3-D–printing technology to reconstruct and model his historic invention.