The Educator’s Lab is a collaborative space for teachers who want to start, or are already teaching Rhino and Grasshopper. It’s a place to build confidence with the tools, stay up to date with new developments, grow as an educator, ask questions, get support, and connect with a community of peers working at the intersection of design, technology, and education.

Anyone can teach Rhino, and we encourage you to. It’s not just another 3D tool. Rhino is a flexible, all-in-one platform where students can sketch, draft, model, render, fabricate, simulate, and code using Grasshopper. It also includes tools like Kangaroo for live physics and Rhino.Inside.Revit for advanced workflows.

Unlike subscription-based software, Rhino uses a permanent license model. For short courses, students can use a 90-day full-featured evaluation. Teaching Rhino gives students one powerful tool to take a project from start to finish, with access to a rich ecosystem of plugins that add specialized tools for specific and professional workflows.

• Create a Rhino Account and join here.
• Log in at Discourse to join our Teacher's Community.
• Join our Educators' mailing list.

The Grasshopper Paradox – Tool Agnostic Mind-set

Dr. Milad Showkatbakhsh, Director of AA EmTech, explores “The Grasshopper Paradox”: though today's designer must be fully tool-agnostic, Grasshopper remains the most effective path to that mindset. The talk centers on computational thinking, decomposing complex problems into modular, systemic processes, and AA EmTech's “Digital-Physical Continuum,” bridging material constraints and digital possibility. The architect, he argues, has shifted from sculptor of form to editor of data. Drawing on his AD Magazine piece “From Genome to G-Code,” the lecture champions a pedagogy built not on software, but on computational logic, cultivating problem-solvers who translate the mathematics of nature into the language of the machine.

About the Speaker

Milad Showkatbakhsh is an architect, educator, and researcher specializing in computational design and emergent technologies. He directs the EmTech postgraduate program at the Architectural Association (AA), and leads the AA DLAB and AA Istanbul Visiting School. As co-founder of Wallacei, an evolutionary multi-objective optimization engine for Grasshopper 3D, he has developed tools that give designers advanced generative and analytic capabilities, grounded in the integration of biological intelligence into architecture and urban design.

He holds a BSc in Architectural Engineering from Shahid Beheshti University, an MArch from Pratt Institute (Sidney Katz Award, 2015), and a PhD from the AA on evolutionary models for homeostatic urban morphologies. He has held Design Technology Director roles across studios in Tehran, New York, Washington, Shanghai, London, and Istanbul, and is widely published in peer-reviewed journals and exhibitions.

Free registration here

• Computational Food Design: Teaching Rhino & Grasshopper with Edible Briefs

• Summer Teacher Training 2025
• Summer Teacher Training 2024
• Free Rhino & Grasshopper Teacher Workshops 2023