The first time I built something that didn't work, I had a laptop and a Google Doc. The first time I built something that did, I had a laptop, a power strip, two USB hubs, a $14 microcontroller, a tin of breakaway pin headers, a notebook with a coffee ring on the cover, and a chair I'd dragged out of the dining room so I wouldn't have to sit on the floor anymore. The difference between those two moments wasn't a tool. It was a room.
I'm sixteen. I've spent more of my life inside school buildings than out of them. And the thing school keeps getting wrong about preparing students for the world we actually live in is not the curriculum, not the schedule, not even the tests. It's the room. Or more precisely: the assumption that the room is a place where you receive things, instead of a place where you make them.
01The room test.
Here's a test you can run on any classroom. Walk in. Don't look at the syllabus, don't look at the whiteboard. Look at the surfaces. Are they horizontal? Are they reachable? Could you, right now, lay out the parts of a small project across them — wires, a soldering iron, a half-built frame, a stack of printouts, a screen — and leave it there overnight without anyone moving it?
For the rooms I've sat in, the answer is almost always no. The desks are too small. They're assigned. They get wiped at 3:15. The walls are not for pinning to. The floor is not for sitting on. Everything tilts toward the laptop, because the laptop is the only thing the room is actually shaped for: a flat surface, a charger nearby, an institutional Wi-Fi password.
A laptop is a beautiful machine. It is also a profoundly portable, profoundly solitary one. It assumes you're one person, working alone, on a problem someone already knows the shape of. You can do school on a laptop. You can do a job on a laptop. You can do almost anything on a laptop, except have a project with a body.
02What a laptop is actually for.
I am not anti-laptop. I'm writing this on one. The laptop is where I do the work that is mostly thinking about something — writing, sketching, looking up papers, talking to a model, rendering an idea fast enough that I can decide whether to keep it. That's a huge part of being a student in 2026, and I would not give the laptop back.
But the laptop, structurally, is a window. You look through it. You don't really inhabit it. When the work is purely symbolic — code, words, equations — that's fine; the inside of the window is where the work lives. When the work has a body, the window stops being enough. You need a floor, a wall, a desk you're allowed to mess up.
Most schools, in my experience, are built around the assumption that all real student work is symbolic. Hence: rows, desks, the laptop on top of the desk, the bell, the next room. The machinery is exquisitely tuned for a world that mostly doesn't exist anymore, where the gap between "I had an idea" and "I made the thing" required permission, equipment, and several adults.
03What a lab is for.
A lab is not a room with equipment. A lab is a room with consent. Consent to leave things half-built. Consent to fail in public. Consent to the kind of mess that means you're thinking with your hands. The equipment is downstream of the consent; you can have a lab with a $40 budget if the room agrees to be one, and you can have a $400,000 maker-space that isn't, because everything has to be checked out and returned and explained.
When I say every student needs a lab, I mean every student needs at least one room — anywhere, any size — where the default is build, then maybe explain, instead of explain, then maybe build. That single inversion changes who you become.
- You stop asking permission for ideas before they're allowed to be ideas.
- You learn the difference between thinking and pretending to think.
- You meet failure on terms small enough that it doesn't humiliate you.
- You discover, finally, that there are problems your laptop cannot help you with — and the relief is unbelievable.
04Your bedroom counts.
I want to be clear: I'm not writing a policy paper. I'm not waiting for my school to install a maker-space. (They might. They probably won't, in time.) The lab I'm describing can be a corner. It can be a folding table by the window. It can be the half of your bedroom you've decided is allowed to be messy. The point of the room is not the room — it's the boundary you draw around a piece of the world and say: inside here, I'm allowed to be wrong.
Mine is roughly two square metres. There's a 3D printer I bought used, which has been on fire twice1. There's a tiny vise that I think was originally for fishing tackle. There's a wall covered in receipts and printouts and one very stubborn polaroid of a horse. There's a chair that's broken in a way that's only a problem if you lean back. The room is, objectively, a hazard. The room is, subjectively, the most important square footage in my life.
05The assignment.
So here is the only piece of advice I have any business giving, as a sixteen-year-old who has made more bad things than good ones: find a room. Make a room. Beg, borrow, or rearrange a room. It does not need to be impressive. It needs to be tolerant. The world you're about to walk into will reward the people who learned, early, that ideas have bodies and bodies have rooms.
Your laptop will follow you wherever you go. That's the whole point of a laptop. But the room — the room is the part you have to make on purpose. Nobody else will make it for you, and the longer you wait, the more politely you'll let yourself believe that thinking and doing are the same thing.
They aren't. They never were. The lab is where you find out.