Contents
Faculty
Every member of the faculty at Abington is a member of MakerSpace! There are many ways, both formal and informal, that you can get involved. Our 4 pillars of Discovery, Collaboration, Innovation, and Creativity support all of them. Below we discuss the pragmatics of using MakerSpace:
- … to improve and enhance Grant applications
- … to supercharge Scholarship, Research, and Creative Work
- … in the classroom to leverage our delivery model
- … to expand your use of Aternative Pedagogies
- … to support Undergraduate Research
Our Four Pillars
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Discovery
Make Cool Stuff
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Collaboration
Do It Yourselves
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Innovation
STEAM Powered
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Creativity
Learning is Doing
Let’s lean in more…
- Discovery | You never know what discovery you or your students will find at MakerSpace. People make cool stuff with us. If you are curious, just by drop in and see a printmaker create an etching, an engineer design a weather satellite, or an IST student bring a light saber facsimile to life with code and circuitry.
- Collaboration | An artist, an engineer, and an entrepreneur walked into a maker space… Sounds like a bad dad joke, but ironically, interdisciplinary collaboration is the key to a successful DIY culture because no one can know it all. We call this Do It Yourselves culture. It is a culture of sharing, and by working with people who need your skills when they don’t have time to develop them on their own, everyone amplifies their own disciplinary superpowers.
- Innovation | MakerSpace is one of the rare places where people from vastly different fields cross paths in a deliberately unstructured way. This kind of meeting of minds has been the catalyst for world-changing innovation, from the Bauhaus to Pixar. The curriculum model that emerges from this is known as STEAM—that’s STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) re-combined with the creative catalyst of Art—and we work with campus entities from ACCESS to LaunchBox to develop opportunities for students and faculty to innovate.
- Creativity | Education at its best unleashes creativity. We don’t abstractly lecture about mechanical stresses or chat about artistic theories of negative space or speculate about a business plan: we learn by doing! We help you encourage constructive failure or stepping outside of a comfort zone. These are moments of high-impact learning, and they happen by doing stuff.
Enhancing Grant Proposals
MakerSpace can help you punch above your weight when planning a grant application. Think about what can set your proposal apart—think about MakerSpace!
Campuses generally fall into two categories: those that don’t have a maker space, and those that do. But: the ones that do typically have dedicated spaces—available only to one or two programs.
The Abington MakerSpace model is exceptional in that we are open to the entire campus.
This means a faculty member from any discipline can consider how they might leverage MakerSpace to enhance and improve a grant application.
This affords you an opportunity to create a proposal for innovative work that can distinguish your application for the same funding streams:
- Consult with the MakerSpace Program Coordinator early in the process of planning your application. We can brainstorm ways of using our resources you may be unaware of.
- As we define the use of MakerSpace in your work, the Coordinator can help you determine the scope of work, materials, and associated costs will be so that it can be incorporated confidently into a budget proposal.
- Concurrently, consult with the campus Director of Research, Dr. Michael Bernstein, who can help you highlight how involving MakerSpace can be perceived as a positive aspect of your proposal, as well as provide additional assistance with crafting the budget.
Supercharging Scholarship, Research, and Creative Work
MakerSpace is yours to use for scholarship, research, or creative projects. Examples of faculty using MakerSpace support include the following:
- 2019 | Engineering Professor Yi Yang used the high resolution of resin printing, combined with a technique of non-uniform aspect ratio scaling in 3D modeling, to visualize scans created for his study of impasto in painting.
- 2019 | Engineering Professor Mukul Talaty used 3D printing in his personal research.
- 2019 | Art Associate Teaching Professor wiilliamCromar used multiple fabrication processes and 3D modeling to develop a body of work based on three-dimensional anamorphic projection.
- 2017-18 | williamCromar also used MakerSpace resources to develop designs for LaunchBox entrepreneurship client AquaBlocks LLC.
There are many other stories of research and creative work supported by us—including yours in the future! To use MakerSpace, come in for a consultation with the Program Coordinator and we’ll brainstorm. We can assist with determining the scope, materials, and associated costs, with an eye toward efficiency, appropriateness, and cost-effectiveness.
In Your Classroom
Our Delivery Model
Most people walking through our door for the first time have no experience with maker culture or maker spaces. That’s a good thing! It’s why we are here. However, it does help you decide how to use us in the classroom to understand what MakerSpace is and is not as a campus service facility.
MakerSpace is:
- A powerful prototyping facility optimized for individuals or small groups of 16 or fewer
- An empowering DIY (Do It Yourself) work shop
- A flexible academic support space, not a classroom for a specific discipline.
MakerSpace is not:
- A fabrication facility—we can’t realistically run large-batch jobs on our single machines, though we can help broker access to fabrication spaces.
- A service bureau—our mission is to empower people to empower themselves, not to foster dependency on us by making things on spec. We happily teach a hungry person how to fish!
- Solely an Art or IST or Engineering or Entrepreneurship space—our mission is to cultivate the de-siloing of all these disciplines and more through collaborative and social interaction.
Beyond Our Model
When We Can’t Help We Still Help! | Abington MakerSpace excels at delivering access to small-scale, DIY rapid prototyping and testing for our community.
Many times, a client needs a scope of service outside of this model, and we’re happy to consult with faculty to share our knowledge about maker resources that can:
- Accommodate a large scale group project.
- Print materials other than PLA or resin.
- Perform manufacturing, not just prototyping.
- Provide a service bureau model of delivery, distinct from the DIY culture of our workspace.
We can function as a referral service to other vendors in the PSU system, as well as commercial options locally and online.
Small Group Support | MakerSpace primarily accommodates individual work, but so long as it does not compromise this service model, we can accommodate smaller-scale group and class projects. Please broker this by contacting the Coordinator at the email link below. The earlier in an academic term this is done, the better chance we can deliver for your group.
Be aware of the popular times in an academic term for this kind of work—and be aware of the manner in which our heat map heats up, here charted week by week for an average term:
How Can We Help You?
Ask for a consult with the Program Coordinator at the Contact page.
Supporting Alternative Pedagogies
High-Impact Support
Twenty-first century alternative education models and strategies have high impact. They future-proof life’s pathways to engage careers and disciplines that haven’t even been invented yet. At the same time, they channel a re-emerging experiential sensibility being revived in any number of outlets, from distributed culture movements to crowd-funded entrepreneurship, from online crafting communities to popular DIY entertainments.
MakerSpace is designed to support pedagogies informed by these emerging alternatives. It is a trans-disciplinary support facility on par with a Library, a Learning Center, or an undergraduate research program. Faculty and students from any class or major can enrich the traditional academic experience by taking advantage of our services.
MakerSpace has served a variety of support functions, including:
- ACURA projects
- LaunchBox and other entrepreneurship activities
- Access to tools for ART 102 Beginning CAD for Artists, now a popular general education course on our campus
- TransMedia Narratives interdisciplinary collaborative curriculum experiments
- Class project ideas for Art, Engineering, IST and other disciplines
- Honors program projects
Alternative Inspirations and Aspirations
MakerSpace supplements and enhances traditional pedagogies with models and theories that complement what’s possible in a traditional classroom. These alternatives include, but are not limited to:
- Learning by Doing
- STEM to STEAM
- DIY Enculturation
- Design Thinking
- Transdisciplinarity
Let’s dive deeper:
- Learning by Doing | Rooted in the philosophy of John Dewey and expressed in experiential and hands-on learning modes developed by David Kolb in Experiential Learning: Experience as the Source of Learning and Development, modern incarnations of learning by doing include progressive education, professional learning communities, collaborative teaching, and heuristics. Learning by doing suggests that true education—knowledge that is retained—is active instead of passive, reflective instead of uncritical, concrete instead of abstract, and archetypal instead of formulaic.
Kolb’s Learning Styles by Cynthia D’Acosta – find out more
- STEM to STEAM (to STREAM?) | To perceive STEM as just a collection of more-or-less-lucrative disciplines, distinguished by data-centricity and a propensity to drive economic progress, is to fundamentally misunderstand STEM. The curriculum model offered by STEM education instead asserts that subjects in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics should not be taught discretely, but rather combined in a project-based, holistic context.
Georgette Yakman’s STEAM curriculum proposes that art and design, creativity and expression, add an integrative dimension to the STEM model—an idea with roots as deep as the Renaissance!
Yakman’s STEAM Pyramid: visit steamedu.com to learn more
Still others suggest STREAM—adding a dimension of Reading and wRiting—provides an even more well-rounded foundation for project-based learning. While the acronymic debate may rage on, all these models agree on one fundamental principle: a collaborative and integrative project-based curriculum improves outcomes.
- DIY and Distributed Culture. Do It Yourself is a subculture often associated with Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Catalog of the 1960s or the punk rock movement of the 1970s, but it has deep roots that extend to the Arts and Crafts movement championed by William Morris, and even earlier. Current expression of the DIY ethos is found in a variety of contexts, including online craft communities, life-hacking, open source software, littleBits or Arduino electronics, and many others. These constitute what new media artist and scholar Jon Ippolito defines in his essay Canon Fodder as Distributed Culture: expertise, curation, and communication existing beyond the confines of high culture and subverting elitist, canonical definitions of “what’s good.”
More at Canon Fodder by Jon Ippolito
- Design Thinking. The cognitive processes used by designers or design collaborators have long been used in traditional creative fields. Thought leaders such as inventor and psychologist William J. J. Gordon, author of Synectics: The Development of Creative Capacity, laid the ground work for “teachable creativity” later exploited by the Stanford d school, which decoupled design thinking methodology from obvious disciplines and offered it in a democratic manner to anyone who would benefit from applying it.
The original design thinking diagram from Stanford d school, which you can find out more about here
- Transdisciplinarity. In his article Disciplinarities: intra, cross, multi, inter, trans, musician Alexander Refsum Jensenius brilliantly extends and clarifies the logic of Marilyn Stember’s discussion of interdisciplinary work (relating in her instance to the social sciences), defining a full spectrum ranging across intra-, cross-, multi-, inter- and trans-disciplinary frameworks. MakerSpace subscribes to the Jensenian model and helps others to find clarity in whatever manner of collaboration they find appropriate.
Diagram by Alexander Refsum Jensenius, which you can find out more about in his article
Using MakerSpace in Undergraduate Research
ACURA
Not the car: it’s Abington College Undergraduate Research Activities! Undergraduate research is a huge feature of academic life at Abington and extends learning beyond the classroom in long-term partnership with faculty and other students. And MakerSpace is there to help. We don’t print the posters for the poster fair, but we can help you build a weather station, learn how to letterpress with laser-cut plates, or develop assets for VR—all actual examples of past ACURA support using us!
Consult with the Program Coordinator early in the planning stages of an undergraduate research project and we can provide valuable advice about using ACURA resources wisely for maker activities.
MakerFest
MakerFest is an informal, freewheeling event where student projects that are challenging to present in the formal poster session are on display for the campus community. Anything from robots to game consoles to 3D printed chain mail to graphic novels might show up on our display tables and demonstration booths. While work exhibited at MakerFest does not necessarily have to originate with MakerSpace activities, we are a co-organizer and major presence during the event, held in conjunction with the ACURA poster fair in April. Keep an eye out for MakerFest2024!
If you have a project that looks like a good candidate for inclusion, contact the Program Coordinator—the sooner the better!