New Orleans, Louisiana
June 26, 2016
June 26, 2016
June 29, 2016
978-0-692-68565-5
2153-5965
Tricks of the Trade - Experiences Designing Courses and Communities
Student
8
10.18260/p.27023
https://peer.asee.org/27023
689
Recent graduate of the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) interested in healthcare delivery and innovation. University Innovation Fellow.
I'm a junior at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, working to create low cost medical devices. As a biomedical engineering major and business owner, I know that success requires an equal balance between entrepreneurship and engineering. Because of this I attend local symposiums, lectures, and events regarding entrepreneurship, engineering, art, science, culture, and innovation in order to expand my perspective and expose myself to ideas that I can translate into my own work.
In addition to my major I'm minoring in entrepreneurship. I'm now the first student start-up at the Innovation Lab created by UAB at the Innovation Depot.
2nd year undergraduate student at UAB majoring in Biomedical Engineering with a minor in Military Sciences.
As universities increasingly strive to create campus environments that encourage interdisciplinary innovation, the maker and hacker space movement has gained significant traction as a solution with great promise, potentially empowering students to bring their own ideas to fruition. Identifying and designing spaces that can appeal to students across campus can be a particular challenge, especially from the perspective of faculty and administration. Faculty design teams aided by student advisors can be seen as a logical answer to this problem, but what of student teams leading the movement on their own campuses? As a team of eighteen undergraduate students that hail from different disciplines, we are currently in the beginning stages of implementing a fully-functional maker space in the primary library for undergraduates.
Our planning was and is strongly informed by the Stanford d.school method of design thinking consisting of the fundamental steps of empathize, define, ideate, prototype, and test. Using this method as a framework, we will describe our experiences with the development, design, and implementation of a student-led makerspace. Given that on our campus it is rare that students take on a task as seemingly large as developing a makerspace, we feel it is necessary to highlight the resources and infrastructure needed in terms of people, facilities, and funding to create a sustainable program. This process is an inherently iterative one and we will explain the mistakes made and lessons learned during the development and implementation of the space. Our discussion of the makerspace’s implementation will be supported by both quantitative and observational data from the first months of our space being created. Through this paper, we aim to present our methods and experiences as starting points for students interested in starting their own spaces on campus.
Shelley, J. P., & Satterfield, F., & Borah, R., & Ladner, M. D. (2016, June), The Student-led Development, Design, and Implementation of an Interdisciplinary Makerspace Paper presented at 2016 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition, New Orleans, Louisiana. 10.18260/p.27023
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