WORK IN PROGRESS: Design, Creation and Assessment of Innovation Spaces Across an Engineering Campus

摘要

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. 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. 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.