April 2022
Featured Article
Highlights of the Making and Makerspaces in Electrical and Computer Engineering Education Workshop
By: Shawn S. Jordan, Arizona State University
Makerspaces attract many with strong interest in electrical and computer engineering (ECE)-related topics, including embedded systems, robotics, artificial intelligence, human-computer interaction, and electronics, and many makers self-identify as having interests related to ECE. However, many university and community college makerspace facilities focus primarily on mechanical fabrication tools such as 3-D printers and laser cutters.
On Friday, March 25, 2022, a group of over 50 chairs, faculty, instructors, and lab staff from universities and community colleges, along with representatives from nonprofit organizations and industry gathered to discuss how “making” can have many touchpoints that support the preparation of thriving electrical and computer engineers.
A key takeaway from the workshop is that as a discipline, we need to shift from thinking about maker spaces and moving toward an action-oriented mindset of making change. Through this shift, we can meaningfully think about shifting ECE culture to be more inclusive, promoting the unique identity development of our students to include making, grow meaningful partnerships with communities (rather than simply designing for communities), and differentiate labs and makerspaces as necessarily having distinctly different cultures.
Another key takeaway was that there can be many touchpoints for making throughout ECE education pathways for students. Making can be used in pre-college outreach and recruitment settings to build student interest in hands-on project-based engineering learning, as well as in extracurricular settings such as FIRST Robotics. Making can happen for fun in campus makerspaces that are available for students to use on both academic and personal projects. Making can also be done at home, particularly when students are supported to do so with equipment that can be checked out of a library or makerspace. Finally, making can occur in individual classes - not only in the first and last years, but in sophomore and junior design classes. Combined, infusing making throughout ECE education pathways can help our students become thriving engineers.
Workshop sessions included a panel entitled “State of (Change)Making in ECE) featuring thought leaders from the maker community, ECE faculty and staff, industry, and maker education research. An interactive session entitled "Making with Purpose: How Makerspaces Can Change the World" engaged workshop attendees with panelists in an interactive discussion of how we can connect our makerspaces with communities to improve impact, recruitment, and retention. Over lunch, attendees participated in a hands-on making session with companies and institutions committed to the advancement of making in ECE, followed by a session on anti-racist engineering spaces that challenged attendees to consider how our spaces, classes, and activities can be made relevant to people from different cultures. The workshop concluded with a presentation from Dr. Don Millard from NSF on opportunities for research and funding in this area, and an unconference where enthusiastic groups discussed how institutions can build successful partnerships with communities, how institutions can partner with industry to achieve greater impact, and how ECE can grow a stronger presence in mechanical engineering-focused makerspaces.
Speakers and workshop facilitators include thought leaders from the Nation of Makers, Digi-Key, Cypress Semiconductor, Edge Impulse, Microchip, Arizona State, Bucknell, Navajo Technical University, the University of Illinois, University of Maryland - Baltimore County, UTEP, and the HacDC hackerspace. Funding for this workshop is provided through the National Science Foundation (EEC-1853158), with support from Arizona State University, Bucknell University, and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Broadly, the workshop raised the questions of (1) what is engineering?, and (2) what is making?, positing that as we look at intersections where “making” is about creating and “engineering” is about solving problems, makerspaces can be one solution to exploring intersections that can illuminate possible futures for student-centered ECE education.