BFab for Faculty: Using Making to Empower Entrepreneurially-Minded Learning

Work in progress (innovative practice). Availability of campus maker-spaces has grown significantly over the past decade. While students make use of these tools for their own curiosity, research, and senior design courses, the potential for use of these spaces across the engineering curriculum goes unrealized. With tools such as laser-cutters and 3-D printers readily available to students, faculty need no longer wait for senior design to ask students to physically realize a design that’s relevant to a class topic. Our hypothesis was that the primary barrier preventing faculty from assigning in-depth prototype-based class projects was their own unfamiliarity with the tools the students would need to use to create those prototypes. We created a summer workshop on the fabrication capabilities of our maker-spaces and entrepreneurially-minded learning (EML) and delivered it to over 30 faculty and staff in the summer of 2017. Our workshop aimed to increase faculty familiarity with these tools and with the pedagogical approaches that leverage them and thereby empower faculty to assign open-ended, prototype-based experiences that center value-creation. Faculty were further coached on inductive pedagogical approaches such as problem-based learning. The subset of faculty that attended at least three different topical workshops and the pedagogy workshop went on to develop and share new assignments for their courses. This paper describes the workshop content and structure, results of the post-workshop survey, and an overview of the student assignments generated in the workshop. Results to date suggest that faculty did create assignments reaching higher levels within Bloom’s taxonomy as a result of the workshop and more fully implement the “value-creation” aspect of EML