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The Student-led Development, Design, and Implementation of an Interdisciplinary Makerspace

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Conference

2016 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Location

New Orleans, Louisiana

Publication Date

June 26, 2016

Start Date

June 26, 2016

End Date

June 29, 2016

ISBN

978-0-692-68565-5

ISSN

2153-5965

Conference Session

Tricks of the Trade - Experiences Designing Courses and Communities

Tagged Division

Student

Page Count

8

DOI

10.18260/p.27023

Permanent URL

https://peer.asee.org/27023

Download Count

689

Paper Authors

biography

John Phillip Shelley University of Alabama at Birmingham Orcid 16x16 orcid.org/0000-0002-8612-3022

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Recent graduate of the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) interested in healthcare delivery and innovation. University Innovation Fellow.

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biography

Forrest Satterfield Satterfield Technologies

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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.

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Rohit Borah University Innovation Fellows, The University of Alabama at Birmingham

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Murray Dean Ladner III University of Alabama at Birmingham

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2nd year undergraduate student at UAB majoring in Biomedical Engineering with a minor in Military Sciences.

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Abstract

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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