Visiting CEMER

As part of the acceleration programme Empezar a Emprender and its one to one mentoring we had the opportunity to visit this educational project located in Cordoba. La Escuela de Madera is a vocational learning school located in Encinas Reales, a small town nearby Lucena which is the second largest city in the province and has a notable timber manufacturing industry.

The school was created nearly two decades ago to train professionals for the region and runs a number of programmes teaching furniture design and timber manufacturing. Some years ago the school was appointed as Centro de Referencia Nacional so in addition to their courses the are also involved in pilot projects and research on timber education.

Despite the size of the school and its unexpected location, Encinas Reales is a very small town with less than 3000 inhabitants, the facilities are excellent with well equipped workshops and a motivated faculty.

We were pleasantly surprised with the digital manufacturing area, there is a digital prototyping lab with plenty of 3D printers, laser cutter and small sized CNC and and CNC workshop with industrial equipment including a 5 axis CNC and a large size laser cutter.

As part of the visit we had an opportunity to show our research and projects on digital fabrication such as wikiroom, Domenico.cc and fabWindow. Also, we demoed the Shaper Origin as we think this type of equipment can be an amazing educational tool to bridge the gap between traditional manual power tools and industrial digital fabrication equipment.

We are delighted that there is a center like this near us. Vocational schools are formal educational spaces which differ from fab labs and makerspaces in their daily operation but they play a fundamental role in industry skill training and accreditation. We are looking forward to collaborating with them in the future, stay tuned!