Contents
Students
Every student at Abington is a member of MakerSpace! There are many ways, formal and informal, that you can get involved. Our 4 pillars of Discovery, Collaboration, Innovation, and Creativity support all of them, from work done in classes to undergraduate research, student life activities to campus job opportunities.
- Make Cool Stuff | You never know what Discovery you’ll make at MakerSpace. 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. There is always cool stuff being made by people like you—and by you yourself! Surprise yourself by discovering what you can do.
- Do it Yourselves | 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. Maker culture 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 superpowers.
- STEAM Powered | 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.
- Learn by Doing | Education at its best unleashes your 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 about them by doing! We deliberately embrace and encourage constructive failure, stepping outside of your comfort zone, and getting back up on a horse that throws you. These are moments of actual learning, and they only happen by doing stuff. Let’s explore how below…
Learn by Doing
Classes
ART 102 (GA) | Based in the Art Program, this studio course is the fastest way to become a MakerSpace ninja! It introduces you to making original creative work on four primary machines: vinyl cutter, laser cutter, 3D printer, and CNC router. It’s not only the fastest way to take deep dive into the MakerSpace, it’s a 3 credit course satisfying general education in art (GA)! To find out more, visit the Open Education Resource Wiki developed for the course by williamCromar, Program Coordinator for Abington MakerSpace.
Projects in Other Courses | Several campus programs have used MakerSpace for projects. We’ve helped with relief printing projects in Printmaking classes, 3D printing group projects for Engineering, capstone projects in IST, and student directed projects in Entrepreneurship.
And those are just the usual suspects! Imagine learning a machine and using your own experience to craft a real-world technical writing piece in an English course, instead of just making stuff up. Imagine inventing your own custom tool for use in a physics lab experiment. Imagine expressing patterns of migration studied for a sociology course by designing and building your own board game. The possibilities for projects in your courses are limited only by your imagination—and we can even help you with that if you’re stumped!
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!
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!
Clubs and Student Life
Student life organizations like the Abington chapter of Enactus use MakerSpace to create events, promotion materials, and service projects. Enactus has developed take-aways and activities for their promotional events several times, extending the interest that organization has expressed in maker processes through their history with 3D Printing.
But you don’t need a maker experience in your organization’s past to get involved. We encourage club presidents and other student leaders to come by and see how we can inspire creativity in your organization!
Employment and Internships
We Hire Students!
MakerSpace is the coolest job on campus, and it’s staffed by students! Working on campus comes with many benefits: better pay than many part-time jobs, scheduling that works with you, and development of mad skills that have incredibly more impact for your future than flipping burgers! A typical Monitor works at least 10 hours per week on campus, and we help you find the right balance between work and studies… which is why we also love Work-Study eligible students.
Visit the Employment Criteria document at this link to find out more about working at MakerSpace.
Internships
We encourage students who work with us to develop the opportunity into an internship. The Program Coordinator is your site supervisor, and works with your faculty mentor to assess the meeting of objectives for this academic experience. An excellent example of the enhanced experience of interning for MakerSpace is the website you are looking at right now: it was redesigned remotely by an intern in 2020 during the pandemic crisis, when many internships were unable to run!
Student Representative
A Student Representative is part of the governance structure of MakerSpace. Visit the Ethos page if you are interested in finding out more about this opportunity.
