[Narrator] 22 winners, all under age 20.

$100,000 to drop out of school and pursue our dreams.

This is Teen Technorati.

(upbeat instrumental music)

What are you up to?

I dunno, just checking out the Tech Shop website.

My name is Shantanu Balam I'm 19 years old.

And I'm working on creating new computer interfaces

that use your sense of touch to communicate information,

rather than your sight or your sense of hearing.

So it's supposed to be like a community workshop

where you kind of have access to

a bunch of really expensive equipment.

Wow, so it's like a hackerspace for hardware.

As soon as I landed, I was really excited about

checking out the Tech Shop in San Francisco.

It has a certain amount of history

just in the start up culture.

The biggest challenge for my idea

is just gonna be making hardware that's stable and usable.

Hardware is just a lot more challenging than software,

in the sense that it has a really long life cycle

before you get to something that's usable and workable.

Welcome to Tech Shop.

Please do wear the super safety

goggles of truth and justice.

These are the tools that basically

made the industrial revolution happen.

So this is a manual mel.

I joke that it's very much like operating an etch-a-sketch.

We've had people make parts for lunar landers,

Navy Seal diving equipment.

It's crazy, we have like art history professors,

and like surfers, and all kinds of people

who are generally not in the realms of engineering

like playing with these machines.

We have people making satellites, and samurai armor.

Now this, now this is a cool machine.

So you have this little stream of sand and water

that comes out, it's point oh four inches in diameter.

And that stream of water will cut

through six inches of plate and steel.

So is this programmable?

Yeah, it's actually really easy to draw for this machine.

So if you wanted to make like,

a bunch of like small things in bulk,

you can just cut like a giant piece of metal?

Yes. Oh okay.

Okay, so this is the second floor

of Tech Shop San Francisco.

You can see it's more of a design, quiet programming place.

These tables are really special,

because there's no where else that you get 12 year old kids

sitting next to venture capitalists and like astronauts.

Obviously 3D printing is very prominent right now,

and you can see some of the prints right here.

[Shantanu] So what's like the minimum width that?

You know I'd actually have to look it up,

because this is probly made on a new machine,

and I haven't even spec'd it out yet.

Yeah, I mean they're definitely showing off

how thin like the printing can get. (chuckles)

This is your brand new to Tech Shop

magnet printing machine, we just got this at this locations.

Basically what it does is it takes a neodymium magnet,

cooks it so all the particles are just floating,

and then it aligns them and cools them.

Okay, I could actually use that. (laughing)

[Mel] Finally, someone who has a practical application.

Yeah, you can create like a tech cell surface

called bubble wrap, so you can actually say like this bag,

can actually create like an electronic texture and surface

on the bag where like different parts of it pop up and down.

Could you immert that and make it so that

if I'm wearing a suit and I'm stroking myself,

somebody else could feel that?

Yeah, so that's--

Dude, that's pretty cool.

Tech Shop. (both laughing)

Right now, the future is really uncertain

and the main thing that I want to focus on

is really learning how to do really cool things

with hardware and learning how to build things.

What was your initial kind of

inspiration to go in this route?

It started off as a research project

to see whether you can construct I guess

almost like an augmented reality interface

for someone who is disabled.

Whether it's an auditory disability, or visual disability.

That's pretty cool man.

When I was five years old I wanted to be an astronaut.

So (laughing) I guess a very different

career trajectory if I followed my four year old goals.

(energetic instrumental music)

Looking backwards, it feels like my goals have

slowly and slowly become more and more tangible.

So I start to think less about really big picture

of like I want to go to the moon,

and moreover like what should I be doing

the next couple weeks that can be like

really awesome to play with or

really awesome as a learning experience.

He takes the one!

[Narrator] Tune in for the next episode

of Teen Technorati, when Catherine

wows us with her many talents.

And be sure to subscribe to the Wired channel.