When Ben Roberts spoke at Towradgi Public School about 3D printing last August little did he know how he was about to change a young woman's life.
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In the room was assistant principal and special education teacher Kim Warner.
When Mrs Warner saw what looked like a Lego hand she asked, "can you print a 3D hand? If so I have a candidate for you".
She then told him about her 19-year-old daughter Eliza Warner, who was not even one year old when complications after heart surgery caused an intellectual disability and saw her lose all the fingers on her left hand.
A toe was later made into a thumb but Eliza couldn't hold anything with it until Mr Roberts' company Modfab helped her.
Mrs Warner thought little of the conversation but Mr Roberts decided to have a go at making a prosthetic hand.
He is now on the second prototype and on Thursday an excited Eliza got to take it home.
"Yay ... I'm going to practice," she said.
"This is so good. I can move it up and down. I can't pick anything up yet but I can hold things."
And when she saw that the fingers on the latest prototype had nails, she said "Cool ... the first thing I will do is paint the nails."
Mrs Warner said that what Mr Roberts had done for her daughter was amazing.
"The more he sees her the more it gets refined," she said.
"He has been fantastic. All she has to do is bend her wrist to make the fingers come in. It is really quite remarkable. She has never had to bend her wrist before so there is no strength in those muscles but she has really been building those up.
"When she first saw what she could do it was really exciting. Her whole face lit up.
"When she is at home she is trying to pick things up and do things with it. She is really excited and motivated."
Mr Roberts said the hand was only a couple of modifications away from "being able to do everything we want it to do".
"I've never tackled anything like this before. I like working in the 3D space and the time just flies when I am working on this. And seeing her smile makes it so worthwhile."
The prosthetic hand has proved so useful that Mr Roberts has an idea how the technology can be used to help more people with disabilities. He wants to teach senior high school students how to make prosthetic limbs, and thinks it would enrich the lives of everyone involved.
Modfab is a start-up that was accepted into iAccelerate this year after showing its commitment to introducing 3D printing technology to schools and other educational settings, and training teachers in its use so they can go on to teach it to their students.
"We can't think of a more exciting application for our technology, and for demonstrating the capacity for 3D printing to change people's lives," Mr Roberts said of Eliza's new prosthetic hand.
"It is really just for gripping things. But it will make a real difference to Eliza, and we are going to make the files freely available for others to use."
