Hi there. I'm Kieran. Sometimes I'm called Mister Mills by my students. I am a public high school technology and science teacher based in Toronto, Canada. This is my digital fabrication archive for Fab Academy 2026 where I am documenting the process of making (almost) anything. This page tells you a little more about me and my journey and why I've decided to take on this opportunity.
WHERE IT ALL BEGAN: Christmas morning, 2001, when I unwrapped a purple Game Boy Advance. That device triggered a lifelong obsession with technology. Sure, I spent a fair amount of my childhood playing video games, like many 90s kids, but beyond that I became obsessed with all things technology. Throughout my formative years I would spend my free time taking apart old cellphones, learning ActionScript and coding websites in Flash, making home movies with special effects, modding consoles, jailbreaking iPods, and designing my own video games among so many fixations. However, I never viewed these skills as a career path growing up. For the longest time I assumed "real" tech work required an Engineering degree, and a career in something less exciting and personal. When the time rolled around in high school to pick a career: I chose to study Biomedical Science and become a high school science teacher, both things I had interests in and thought would make good careers.
But the obsession never stopped. Throughout my studies in university, I wrote Python scripts to visualize data for my ecology lab reports, completely unnecessary by the way. I built complex macros to manage data at my part-time job at the campus Food Bank. I took 4th-year discrete math and combinatorics courses just for the fun of it (really confusing professors who couldn't understand why a Bio major was voluntarily sitting in on computer science math). Yet, I still assumed all of this was just a hobby, and that the farthest I could take it would be integration of these interests here and there. It couldn't be something that someone could make a living from.
We fast forward to 2020. I'm now 2 years out of my undergrad, working as a math and science teacher at a high school in Toronto. COVID hits and I become the school's defacto IT guy. Things that are second nature to me are now considered valuable assets to my colleagues (and my students too), who, for many, are navigating the web as a necessity for the very first time. My principal noticed that things I considered "basic" was actually untapped potential, and he encouraged me to pivot. I realized my years of tinkering were actually years of skill-building, so I transitioned to teaching Computer Technology, and haven't looked back. Since then, I’ve transformed my classroom into a maker-focused environment. I teach Skilled Trades, Graphic Design, and Engineering. No more tests or quizzes, just getting messy and making things.
I bought my first 3D printer in November of 2020. Picked up an Arduino kit in March of 2021. By that following summer, I was fabricating custom solutions for my house. My first big system-integrated project: an automatic cat feeder, so my wife and I could step out of the house for a weekend and not worry about our rescue cat (her name is Loaf, and she was quite overweight at the time) from eating too much at once. I tried out other microcontrollers: combining a mini projector with a Raspberry Pi to act as a home theatre system, modding an old Xbox 360 with a Pico, and my own digital camera that ran off a Pi Zero, could take film-style photos and smartly sync them to my Google Photos account. In my classroom, I started trying out new things, got my hands on a class set of micro:bits, found a bunch of old DIP integrated circuits and breadboards in an old supply closet, got my students making redstone circuits in Minecraft Education. On the side, I am the lead teacher supervisor and coordinator for a FIRST Robotics Team. Moving towards hands-on constructivist learning has been terrific. I am so much more excited to get students in the mindset of making, rather than just "studenting". Over the last few years, I've transformed all the courses I've been teaching into maker-focused experiences. I’ve learned that the only prerequisite to being a maker is to make.
That's when I discovered FabAcademy. A program perfectly geared towards my interests, valuing my existing knowledge, and a perfect challenge to continue developing my skills with the mentorship of so many experts and wonderful like-minded people. As there are no nodes in Canada for 2026, I've decided to take a huge leap of faith, take a break from work, pack up my things, and attend the program across two continents: first at Fab Lab ESAN in Lima, Peru, and then at Kannai Fab Lab in Yokohama, Japan. Thank you to my instructors Jorge and Yuichi for making this opportunity possible, I can't thank you both enough. Did I mention I'm currently learning Spanish and Japanese? Estoy emocionado de aprender! どうもよろしくお願い！
Please join me here on this exciting journey over the next 20 weeks. If you'd like to talk shop, please reach out!