On many college campuses, makerspaces have become a hub of creativity and innovation. While each university uses a different model to manage upkeep and safety in their makerspace, several schools have taken up an open access model, allowing any student to use the space with little or no previous training. This open environment may facilitate a sense of belonging for students, which has been shown to improve retention, particularly for underrepresented groups. Additionally, those working in these spaces may gain skills crucial for developing engineers. Makerspace users have reported an improvement in their ability to communicate engineering principles, especially to non-engineers. Makerspaces may also allow students an opportunity to become acquainted with the design process through trial and error while developing design skills through fabrication. To engage students in these spaces, some curricula require the use of the space for certain design courses (such as the program studied herein), while other schools have kept space use as an optional perk for students. This leads to several questions about what impacts these spaces are making on the students, what kind of students are choosing to partake in makerspaces use, what factors drive students to initially and continually participate in makerspaces, and what is the impact that involvement has on the development of design skills.
Participation in academic makerspaces has been studied, but the empirical data of how students are impacted is limited. In an effort to better understand the impact of involvement in academic makerspaces, a longitudinal study on students at three different universities has been carried out over the last four years. Data was collected from students through the use of surveys and collection of GPA and retention data. Students were tracked throughout their respective programs to observe how changes in involvement correlated to changes in factors such as retention and engineering design self-efficacy. This paper gives an overview of the entire study and presents results including trends in voluntary involvement in academic makerspaces over the course of each program and how these trends correlate to other measured factors.
Dr. Ethan Hilton is an assistant professor at Louisiana Tech University in Ruston, LA, where he has been since September 2019. He received his Bachelors in Mechanical Engineering from Louisiana Tech and his Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology with a focus in Engineering Design Methodology and Engineering Education.
As a member of the Integrated STEM Education Research Center (ISERC) at LaTech, Ethan's primary research area is engineering design education with a focus on developing prototyping skills through both class-based projects and extra-curricular clubs, competitions, and activities. This includes a focus on hand-drawn sketches and how they are used as tools for generating ideas and visual communication, especially when it involves the skill to generate quick and realistic sketches of an object or idea. He has also conducted research on the impact involvement in academic makerspaces has on students in engineering programs.
Dr. Robert Nagel is an Associate Professor in the Department of Engineering at James Madison University. Dr. Nagel joined James Madison University after completing his Ph.D. in mechanical engineering at Oregon State University. Nagel teaches and performs research related to engineering design. Specifically, through research, Nagel explores how design interventions commonly used to teach design influence student learning.
Dr. Julie S. Linsey is an Associate Professor in the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technological. Dr. Linsey received her Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering at The University of Texas. Her research area is design cognition including systematic methods and tools for innovative design with a particular focus on concept generation and design-by-analogy. Her research seeks to understand designers’ cognitive processes with the goal of creating better tools and approaches to enhance engineering design. She has authored over 150 technical publications including over forty journal papers, and ten book chapters.
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