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 five fundamental steps of: empathizing, defining, ideation, prototyping, and testing. Using this method as a framework, we will describe our experiences with the development, design, and implementation of a student-led makerspace. Given that it is rare for students on our campus to 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 key 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 with the hope that students interested in the makerspace movement as starting points for students interested in starting their own spaces on campus.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
hi@scite.ai
10624 S. Eastern Ave., Ste. A-614
Henderson, NV 89052, USA
Copyright © 2024 scite LLC. All rights reserved.
Made with 💙 for researchers
Part of the Research Solutions Family.