Makerspaces, libraries and education

Today in the Uni makerspace we held a MEGA-BUILD day. First year Zoology, Animal Behaviour, Wildlife Conservation, Biology and Forensic Anthropology students have been working on a variety of projects over these past few weeks to learn about statistics and so @ka81 and I thought we’d spend the day with them making.

An all-girls private school in New York City and a Texas district are among the first to provide littleBits' programmable electronics kits to all students or libraries.

3D printing has some amazing possibilities for architecture and design, not the least of which is engineering personalized tissue – in this case, printing a personalized nerve scaffold for your post-injury healing.

Part of why engaging with 3D A team of researchers have created a first-of-its-kind 3D printed guide that helps restore sensory and motor functions to damaged nerves.

Spaces for makers, hackers and coworkers on campus could support better learning, and entrepreneurial, outcomes. But what do they look like?

maker-spaces-innovationDesignated spaces for “tinkering” at some of the country’s most prestigious institutions may not only spur lifelong learning habits, but also produce social and technological innovations critical to today’s economy, says a new report.

Thanks to more broad access to the internet, as well as “breakthroughs” in manufacturing, innovation has been democratized, says a new research report by HermanMiller, in turn creating a “new driver for the economy.”

The easiest way to learn electronics and Arduino programming.

Sierra College in Rocklin, CA, a suburb of Sacramento, has helped a Hacker Lab open near its campus and has already seen its students start to benefit.

The maker space that also offers co-working space, courses, meet-ups and events is a spin-off of the original Hacker Lab that opened in Sacramento four years ago. Sierra College helped facilitate the opening of the second lab to give both students and those who live nearby the opportunity to get hands-on experience with the technology they are learning back in their community college classrooms.

This summer, MakerSquare and Uber formed a partnership to teach our students about the Uber API, and connect MakerSquare graduates with the Uber’s world-class engineering team.

On July 25th and 26th, MakerSquare SF hosted the very first Uber/MakerSquare hackathon. Here’s a look inside the event.

Current MakerSquare students and graduates teamed up to build projects using the Uber API

Harvard researchers have designed new printheads for 3-D printers that can simultaneously handle multiple materials with different properties, allowing for 3-D printing wearable devices, flexible electronics, and soft robots.

To print a flexible device, including the electronics, a 3-D printer must be able to seamlessly transition from a flexible material that moves with the wearer’s joints for wearable applications, to a rigid material that accommodates the electronic components. It would also need to be able to embed electrical circuitry using multiple inks of varying conductivity and resistivity, and precisely switching between them while changing composition and geometry. And do it all in real time.

Experiential education is all the rage.

No longer confined to internships or study abroad, it now includes service learning opportunities, freshman research experiences, and, most ambitiously, project-based learning at all levels of the curriculum.

A growing number of campuses have created special “maker spaces” for innovative projects. UCLA’s Institute for Digital Research and Education has its “Technology Sandbox,” a computing facility where innovators can work collaboratively on projects involving computer modeling, GIS, web authoring, web programming, graphics, animation, image processing, compression and archiving. Columbia University’s Butler Library has created a Digital Humanities Center, where faculty and students can incorporate computer-based textual, bibliographic, image, and video information into their research and teaching. The University of Michigan has instituted the Digital Innovation Greenhouse, the Learning, Education, and Design (LED) Lab, and the Digital Education and Innovation Lab.

Why won’t my daughter engage with school? Is she lazy? Is it too hard? Does she have issues with authority? The answers to these questions lies in her hobbies and the different learning environments she has for each one.

With so much authentic interest-driven opportunity in the outside world, it is incumbent on schools to help kids engage deeply. i

3D printing and additive manufacturing will be the prime topic of research and development at a new center opening at the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT). The Additive Manufacturing and Multifunctional Printing (AMPrint) Center will draw participation from multiple university and corporate partners. Funding is coming from Empire State Development, New York's state economic development agency.