2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

In this evidence-based practice paper, we discuss program evaluation and development in a makerspace for first-year engineering students, with a particular focus on learning from the experiences of student employees managing the space. In our university, students complete a one-year general engineering program before selecting a specific discipline, with a full semester being dedicated to a hands-on design project. This project is supported by an academic makerspace accessible only to first-year engineering students. The makerspace also provides students opportunities to pursue personal projects. The space is run by a faculty program director, a full-time lab manager, and a staff of about 35 part-time student employees who are typically hired based on their experience working on personal projects in their first year of study.
In recent years, the space has encountered growing enrollment, changes to the first-year curriculum, COVID-19, supply chain issues, and new university development plans. In response, the makerspace faculty and staff conducted a program evaluation, and began a campaign of improvements and program expansions. Of particular interest was the student employee program, which had a reputation among the students for being very impactful.
Previous work has indicated that student employees in these spaces gain confidence, and develop communication and mentoring skills. We actively encourage our student employees to develop skills by working on their own projects during working hours when maintenance needs of the lab have been met and no students are present who need guidance on their class projects. This unique attribute of our model allows for employees to bond and collaborate outside of their regular duties, and gives them an improved understanding of the makerspace functions from a user perspective.
To learn from the experiences of the student employees and identify opportunities to leverage and expand that program, several focus groups and student interviews were conducted. Collected data revealed the formation of a strong community of student makers and mentors. This community and job have had major impacts on student design skills, as well as their identity and confidence as engineers. Working in the space was widely seen as a defining part of their undergraduate experience, and allowed the students to engage in the hands-on activities that they felt should characterize engineering.
From an administrative level,the lab management team has developed many practices and solutions guided by years of experience as former student employees of the lab and program faculty. For instance, changing material ordering practices to ordering larger sheets of sheet goods and cutting them down in-house allowed a new table saw to pay for itself within a few months and allow for greater flexibility in response to supply chain disruptions. Student safety training practice streamlining also led to a four-fold increase in available training sessions each semester without reduction in quality.
Those improvements have helped encourage the existing cohort of student employees to champion their own internal projects and process improvements. A notable example of this is an automated 3D print tracker that provides timeline updates to the requester and has resulted in an estimated threefold improvement in manufacturing capacity. Additional projects are being spearheaded by the student employees to display and search inventory in real time, develop shop infrastructure to increase storage efficiency & lab workflows, and streamline the peer onboarding process to expedite competency growth & training.
This work demonstrates that employment in a first-year makerspace can help students to develop a variety of confidences and skills, and that managers can utilize them and their knowledge to make significant improvements to shop processes. These results will be of interest to other makerspace programs, particularly those supporting first-year engineering students. They also add insight into the less studied experiences of student workers that often staff these makerspaces, which can lead to more effective utilization. Future work will include closer looks at mentorship and other skills developed by these student employees.