Board # 141 : The Engineering Education Maker Identity Project: A Look at the First Year

The LBJ Institute for STEM Education & Research at Texas State University launched a threeyear research study to examine how university Maker Spaces might affect student identity formation and self-efficacy, and how these experiences can be leveraged to serve as a potential pathway to engineering. The primary experimental work for this research aims to: 1) discover key concepts and principles that particularly enable a more diverse group of students to leverage creativity and innovation toward success in engineering careers; 2) discover specific learning models that involve both STEM university students and pre-service teachers in order to develop teamwork, self-efficacy, communication, and identity formation in the Maker environment; 3) pilot instruments to measure the impact of such programs on students’ self-efficacy, communication, and identity formation and 4) understand to what extent students who use the maker space for a class project become regular users of the space. This paper reports on the progress and findings from the first year of implementation. Maker Space user log in data will be analyzed as will preliminary results of student surveys. Further, the paper will describe the integration of making-based projects into engineering design and educational technology courses.