The arrival of academic makerspaces on college campuses signals an important development for engineering design education. On a growing number of campuses, traditional machine shop equipment has been combined with digital design and manufacturing tools to establish creative communities. These communities support academic, extracurricular and personal design activities under the watch of university faculty, staff, and students. As awareness of the value of academic makerspaces increases in academic and non-academic settings, a larger number of universities are developing these new facilities for learning and creating, often with unique institutional purposes. This paper reviews facilities at

The emphasis from ABET to integrate the design experience across the curriculum has initiated a call for action to engineering departments across the country. This challenges engineering educators to include design in a wide variety of engineering courses and to prevent this emphasis from foreshadowing the subject material of each course. A comprehensive approach is needed where the design work is not a separate entity, but rather is an additional tool which can be used to teach the fundamentals of engineering. This paper reports on the advances of one institution in responding to the call to integrate design across the engineering curriculum. The U.S. Coast Guard Academy (USCGA) has established a design philosophy that treats design education as a developmental process to be practiced during each of the four undergraduate years. To put that philosophy into practice, the USCGA has restructured the engineering curriculum to ensure that students experience design content in their courses each year. This viewpoint of design as a developmental process is consistent with the broad educational objectives of the institution. This paper presents examples of design work from courses in each year of the students' education to illustrate the variety of design problems used to incorporate design across the curriculum. The experiences at the U. S. Coast Guard Academy have been positive and indicate the design across the curriculum initiative can be implemented without drastically impacting faculty workload.

While originating in non-academic settings, the “Maker Movement” has quickly made inroads within academia. More significant than the facility that may be referred to as a makerspace is the makerspace culture, including the community that forms around the physical facility and the activities (programs) of that community. This paper reviews the history of the maker-phenomenon, details the development of higher education makerspace cultures over the last five years, and explores the impact of makerspace cultures on mechanical engineering education. The makerspace culture at two higher education institutions is used to illustrate the effect on engineering education within each institution. The paper concludes with a review of common practices within the higher education makerspace ecosystem.

The proliferation of higher education makerspaces -sites where students, faculty, and staff design and build solutions to engineering challenges and other problems -suggests that such spaces have a special value on university campuses in a number of contexts. This paper reports on the unique impact of a higher education makerspace (the Yale Center for Engineering Innovation and Design) in the arena of design education. We review the history of design education, identifying the values of this form of pedagogy and highlighting many of the challenges involved with teaching design. These values include facilitating design instruction in lab settings, establishing a continuum of design experiences, and incorporating meaningful problem-based learning activities. Similarly, we review higher education makerspaces to provide insights into how they can play a role in mitigating challenges associated with teaching design. Using examples from eight courses taught in the profiled higher education makerspace, three design-focused instructional methods are presented that integrate course instruction, skill development, knowledge acquisition, and client-based problem solving by student teams. These methods have been applied across all four undergraduate years in courses closely aligned with biomedical engineering, environmental engineering, mechanical engineering, and engineering as a whole (for an introductory course). The courses span design education across the typical gap between cornerstone and capstone design courses. In all cases, the specific role of the higher education makerspace in enhancing the value of these courses is demonstrated.

Background The COVID-19 pandemic has presented an acute shortage of regulation-tested masks. Many of the alternatives available to hospitals have not been certified, leaving uncertainty about their ability to properly protect healthcare workers from SARS-CoV-2 transmission. Objective For situations where regulatory methods are not accessible, we present experimental methods to evaluate mask filtration and breathability quickly via cost-effective approaches (e.g.,~$2000 USD) that could be replicated in communities of need without extensive infrastructure. We demonstrate the need for screening by evaluating an existing diverse inventory of masks/respirators from a local hospital. Methods Two experimental approaches are presented to examine both aerosol filtration and flow impedance (i.e., breathability). For one of the approaches ("quick assessment"), screening for appropriate filtration could be performed under 10 min per mask, on average. Mask fit tests were conducted in tandem but are not the focus of this study. Results Tests conducted of 47 nonregulation masks reveal variable performance. A number of commercially available masks in hospital inventories perform similarly to N95 masks for aerosol filtration of 0.2 μm and above, but there is a range of masks with relatively lower filtration efficiencies (e.g., <90%) and a subset with poorer filtration (e.g., <70%). All masks functioned acceptably for breathability, and impedance was not correlated with filtration efficiency. Significance With simplified tests, organizations with mask/respirator shortages and uncertain inventories can make informed decisions about use and procurement.