2016 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

The Maker movement has expanded over the last several years from the garages of at-home tinkerers to university engineering programs. A “maker” identity has been associated with specific attitudes and abilities, such as creativity, the ability to create physical models, and the embracing of failure, which engineering educators are now striving to foster in their students and throughout curricula.1-3 Over the past ten years, makerspaces, or innovation spaces, have been developed at several universities across the United States through a range of efforts, both grassroots via faculty and student efforts, and institution-led. There have even been recently published best practices for designing these spaces within a university. 4 This work-in-progress paper focuses on one university’s story of implementing makerspaces throughout a campus. It also contains initial data on how these spaces affect students’ abilities to solve open-ended design challenges in the Mechanical Engineering department and will be later assessed in the Electrical Engineering department as well.
The Mechanical Engineering (ME) and Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) Departments at Colorado School of Mines have developed several high-tech and low-tech makerspaces for undergraduate students. These spaces are being utilized for classroom use and for club and do-it-yourself (DIY) projects. We have implemented state-of-the-art machine shops and prototyping labs throughout campus, funded by a combination of internal grants and industry support. These makerspaces have been grassroots efforts, started by both students and faculty in response to student requests for more incorporation of hands-on projects throughout the ME and EE curriculums and for spaces for students to use in their own time.

Due to the range of methods used to develop each of these spaces (spanning faculty-driven, administration-initiated, and faculty-student collaboration), we are in a unique position to document the processes and challenges of creating such spaces and the student-learning objectives achieved both within and outside the curriculum. In addition, each space is set up and used in a different way (an open, 24/7 accessible space versus a supervised space, a lab used for both instruction and student projects compared to one intended entirely for student use). This enables us to assess the impact of different forms of makerspaces on student outcomes such as confidence in hands-on projects and engineering design self-efficacy. The need for an understanding like this has been underlined by others in the field.2

In addition, the ME department has had an on-going IRB-approved study focusing on students’ abilities to understand design and to solve open-ended design challenges. This study has shown powerful results as it began before makerspaces were incorporated throughout the college and campus. It focuses on identifying which courses students have completed, which innovation spaces students have used, what the students’ background is, and how students identify with an engineering design process. We have done both quantitative as well as quantitative analysis on students’ confidence and ability to solve open-ended design challenges. By understanding where the student is in the curriculum along with what their background is (ie: internship, work experience, course work), we will be better able to understand how the makerspaces impact students’ abilities to solve problems. By learning from our failures and documenting success, we have learned a tremendous amount about how to implement successful working makerspaces within a short time frame.

In this paper, we begin by describing the context for this effort at Colorado School of Mines and the various spaces that have been developed. We then compare each lab in detail, highlighting a few key differences. Finally, we discuss briefly efforts to assess the impact on student outcomes.