2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

When college campuses resumed in-person learning opportunities following initial lockdowns during the COVID-19 pandemic, many facets of campus life looked different. These differences continue to evolve semester to semester because of changing health guidelines, school decisions, and personal convictions. Academic makerspaces were not exempt from these changes and have experienced fluctuating usage and usage barriers over the past several semesters. Better understanding the effects of COVID-19 on academic makerspaces can help ensure that students continue to draw maximum benefits from these learning spaces and also provides potential advice for administrator and educators for future disturbances. Data collected via tool usage surveys administered to makerspace users at a large public university during the three semesters following the start of the pandemic (Fall 2020, Spring 2021, and Spring 2022) is used here to investigate. COVID-19 restrictions present during Fall 2020 and Spring 2021 were mostly loosened in Spring 2022. The makerspace is modeled as a bipartite network, with student and tool interactions determined via end-of-semester surveys. The network is analyzed using nestedness, a metric primarily used in ecology to evaluate the stability of an ecosystem and proposed here as a quantitative method to evaluate makerspace health. The surveys used to create the network models also provide validation, as students were asked to share tools used during the semester in question. The results suggest that nestedness is linearly proportional to usage, both increases and decreases. As such, tracking the nestedness of a makespace over time can serve as a warning that unintended restrictions are in place, intentional restrictions and/or policies may be too severe, or whether a space has effectively recovered from temporary restrictions.