An intrepid cohort of eleven SSU faculty gathered to explore how their students might incorporate Maker-style projects to better access university-level curriculum in the diverse fields of art, philosophy, mathematics, business, computer science, education, and English. Participants shared early experiences with inventing, tinkering, and building and offered their visions of how utilizing our makerspace could dovetail with their instructional goals.
Casey Shea, who recently taught a liberal studies course in Making and science, led the group through a round of “Mockups”. In this card-based rapid prototyping design game, groups were randomly assigned a problem, an audience, and a constraint and in just minutes they crafted a model for their solution. Casey then shared examples of the types of artifacts that can be fabricated with the machines in our makerspace. All marveled at a small box with a “living hinge”, created by cutting a very fine pattern into a single piece of wood with a laser.