Mount Holyoke College has been growing the “maker culture” for about four years, incorporating it throughout the liberal arts curriculum. In designing a new space that opened in January 2019 conscious choices were made to create an appealing space.
Empowering the Liberal Arts Student: Tech for All |
Katherine E. Aidala1, Nick Baker2, Rick Feldman3, Peter F. Klemperer4, Shani Mensing5, and Audrey St. John6 |
1Katherine E. Aidala; Dept. of Physics, Mount Holyoke College; e-mail: [email protected] 2Nick Baker; Library, Information, and Technology Services, Mount Holyoke College; e-mail: [email protected] 3Rick Feldman; Entrepreneurship, Organizations, and Society Program, Mount Holyoke College; e-mail: [email protected] 4Peter F. Klemperer; Dept. of Computer Science, Mount Holyoke College; e-mail: [email protected] 5Shani Mensing; Makerspace, Mount Holyoke College; e-mail: [email protected] 6Audrey St. John; Dept. of Computer Science, Mount Holyoke College; e-mail: [email protected] |
Mount Holyoke College has been growing the “maker culture” for about four years, incorporating it throughout the liberal arts curriculum. In designing a new space that opened in January 2019 conscious choices were made to create an appealing space in a discipline neutral environment. Programming includes both curricular and co-curricular opportunities that draw in students with backgrounds who might not intentionally sign up for technical activities. Student workers are trained to create an inclusive environment. Analyzing student participation over the past four years reveals that these efforts attract students from across all the majors at the college.
The major global challenges of the 21st century have a scientific or technical component, but they will not have purely technical solutions. Collaborative teams must have a breadth of expertise across disciplines to tackle complex problems. A liberal arts education prepares students to be critical thinkers with the skills to have meaningful impact on their communities. While many will not pursue STEM-based endeavors, students need to be technically literate with the confidence to interact with unfamiliar technical areas. A makerspace embedded in the liberal arts can infuse technical experiences across campus, through curricular and co-curricular programming. We present the efforts underway at Mount Holyoke College (MHC), a liberal arts college for women and gender minorities. With a focus on fostering interdisciplinary collaboration and an inclusive climate, we create an environment where students discover that technology does not have to be intimidating and sequestered.
To place the challenges and opportunities of a makerspace at a liberal arts institution like ours in context, it helps to understand Mount Holyoke’s incoming student population. MHC is uniquely positioned to attract a wide range of traditionally underrepresented students into experiences with technology. The student body is approximately one quarter international, one quarter domestic minority, and also 17% first generation; all of our students identify as women, transgender, or non-binary. A survey of incoming students asks them to rate how interested they are in taking courses in a range of fields, with results shown in Fig. 1. 75% of our incoming students report they are uninterested or wish to avoid engineering courses, and 51% feel this way towards mathematics, statistics, and computer science[1]. Students express the most interest in foreign languages and literature, social sciences, and English languages and literature. These data are from 2010 – 2015, and though it is possible that the numbers have shifted a bit in the past five years, more recent data are not available.
Women regularly receive the message that programming, engineering, computers, and technology are a white, heterosexual, male domain, along with fields like construction, auto mechanics, and machining. Women are not encouraged to tinker, to get dirty, or to take apart the computer. While using a wrench is not quite the liberal arts ideal, we all live in a physical world, and women generally have had fewer opportunities to develop their mechanical and spatial reasoning. A lack of experience with the mechanical world can lead to feeling out of place in early engineering courses, in science labs, and in spaces like a makerspace[2][3][4]. Nationally, women continue to be severely underrepresented in computer science, engineering, and physics at the bachelor’s degree level [5]. Despite this, Mount Holyoke graduates more female computer science and physics majors than schools ten times our size [6]. Providing role models has been a key to the successful growth and support of diverse participants within male-dominated fields, and we continue this strategy through near-peer student mentors, diverse faculty and staff, and alums that do not fit the typical “maker” stereotype. While all of our students are considered members of a demographic that is underrepresented in STEM fields – as women, transgender, or genderqueer individuals – our goals extend beyond gender diversity to include racial, ethnic, economic, geographic, etc., though we have not yet analyzed these numbers. We do monitor the diversity of the majors that we reach through our events as we tackle general technical literacy and seek to attract new students into STEM majors.
The first concrete step towards broadening participation in “maker” technologies occurred in 2013 with the creation of a course we call iDesign Studio [7]. With the explicit goal of introducing programming, hardware, and design to students with little interest in pursuing a STEM major, the first year seminar enrolled students seeking to satisfy the science distribution requirement. The curriculum aims to demystify technology and teaches electronics using Arduino compatible SquareWear [8]. In this first year cohort, four of the fourteen students became computer science majors. One of these students founded HackHolyoke, a regional hackathon that is entirely student run and achieves gender parity among the participants.
The initial success with iDesign Studio led to grant funding to run the class for community college students in the summer of 2015. Instead of running the course again in a traditional computer science lab, the college provided funding to reconfigure our Media Lab in the Art building, creating the first makerspace on campus. Significantly, the college committed to funding a full time coordinator to develop programming and support the space along with student workers. This roughly 1200 ft2 space contained a laser cutter, two 3D printers, an Other Mill, a vacuum former, a vinyl cutter, and a sewing machine, along with tools and supplies for digital and analog electronics and basic hand tools. Because the space served as a computer lab and was modest in size, we were limited in the tools we could place in the space, though we could collaborate with other spaces on campus. The scene shop (mostly woodworking) can be accessed by students working on theater productions; the costume shop is used by students enrolled in a class or working on a theater production; the sculpture studio is used by studio art students; the science machine shop is mostly closed to students. The makerspace staff could collaborate with staff in these other locations.
Critically, faculty and staff lead the makerspace initiative at MHC, explicitly working across disciplines from the outset and cognizant of the need to find creative ways to expose our diverse student body to technology experiences. Our small community of about 200 faculty leads to frequent conversations across disciplinary boundaries; we do not suffer from the typical disciplinary silos where the physics professors rarely interact with chemistry, let alone English. This familiarity led to quick collaboration across the spaces with relevant equipment, and to a diverse group of faculty discussing the vision of the future space. A formal faculty and staff seminar in 2015-2016 academic year included professors from psychology and education, English, economics, and international relations, who together articulated a vision and advocated for establishing a larger makerspace in a discipline neutral location. The result is the Fimbel Maker & Innovation Lab, which converted the kitchen and dining hall of a residence hall into a discipline-neutral 8,000 square foot makerspace. Fimbel Lab provides a pleasant space that attracts people who walk by outside. Our programming seeks to bring people into the space who have a wide range of motivations. The physical space, the student and professional staff, and the empowering tools and experiences increase the likelihood that they will return.
The group that designed the space consisted of 23 faculty, students and staff from a range of disciplines. The core group of about seven people included some with strong backgrounds in wood, metal, art, machining, electronics, and coding. Many felt out of place in traditional shops, and all were familiar with the barriers that our students face as they embark on new and sometimes intimidating endeavors. We placed a strong value on creating an appealing space. Figure 2 shows photos from the space.
First, the location overlooks a lake and has floor to ceiling windows providing ample natural lighting. There are skylights in the metal and wood shop. There are sightlines between the main workspace and the metal and wood shop, so that those who may find the tools intimidating can still see what people like them are doing. (This is also a safety measure.) The walls that we do have consist mostly of whiteboards or bright colors. Admittedly, we have limited the typical peg board storage and shelf space, but consider this an acceptable trade-off. As important as visual cues are auditory and olfactory considerations. The dust collection unit is outdoors; the air compressor is in a storage area, and we included acoustic damping along the ceiling of the metal and wood shop. We have roof top units for exhaust of the spray booth, laser cutters, and welders, and provide a recirculating fume hood and smaller units for adhesives and soldering. We will not allow our tools to acquire the unpleasant smell that so many of us are familiar with from opening tool chest drawers.
To help build community, we have a lounge area with a kitchenette, recognizing cooking and baking as a form of making. We have two collaboration rooms (effectively classrooms), with four desktop computers in each. We invite student contributions to the space, which include the “greeter desk” in the lounge that repurposed materials from elsewhere on campus, a floor pattern designed by students, and a student logo competition.
Equally important to maintaining a welcoming environment are the staff and people in the space. The director and one of the full time staff members co-teach a course titled Fundamentals of Maker Culture. The curriculum was developed in collaboration with the creators of the successful peer mentor training program for introductory computer science classes, adapting the readings, discussion prompts, and assignments [9] [10]. The curriculum is designed to achieve two main goals: (1) educate students on inclusive and effective peer mentorship; and (2) introduce students to the space and associated tools. Weekly meetings alternate between discussions with reading sand hands-on lessons. Discussion topics prompt students to reflect on factors contributing to successful learning, including growth mindset, emotional intelligence, wise feedback, microaggressions, implicit bias, and universal design. Our discussions ask students to share their personal experiences, with an overarching theme that we all become better mentors by understanding the perspectives of others. Students and instructors alike begin to understand how words intended to be supportive from one person can potentially convey a different message to another.
In our new space, we have three separate locations intended for group learning experiences, each outfitted with A/V equipment. In this way, we can offer courses that meet regularly in the space as well as one time workshops for other classes that happen simultaneously. Fimbel Lab has an 8,000 ft2 footprint, with about 3,500 ft2 dedicated to making.
As an academic makerspace, in-depth course work or mentored independent projects can follow initial short experiences that spark an interest. We aim to provide a wide range of opportunities as we thoughtfully pursue ways to draw in students who might otherwise dismiss some of the more technical pursuits. Our goal is to infuse the curriculum and community with enough experiences that it will be difficult to graduate after four years without having participated in some makerspace run activity. Our small community can effectively publicize the opportunities the makerspace offers as well as direct students to the individuals with the right expertise.
Workshops require a few hour commitment, occur outside of class time, are voluntary, and free. For example, the Halloween costume making workshop is preceded by workshops on wearable electronics and Arduinos. We hold Chocolate Lab before Valentine’s Day, using the first workshop to introduce CAD and 3D printing to students, and the second to vacuum form the molds and teach the materials science of tempering chocolate. Take-apart nights allow students to see inside common technology that surrounds them.
In contrast to short, voluntary workshops, classes offered in the makerspace ask for a substantial time commitment. iDesign Studio is now open to all years, offered every semester, and suffers from a waitlist. A design-build course in architecture built our “greeter” desk in the lounge, using wood from a tree on campus and repurposing old floorboards and hardware. Engineering for Everyone helps students understand what different fields of engineering do while teaching the design process. Geosciences in the Makerspace asks students to create 3D or motion-capable representations of the fossil record. Alternatively, two classes with substantial project time can link their classes. A robotics course and art studio course created interactive sculptures, and iDesign Studio and a costume making class came together to orchestrate a live performance with interactive lighting on costumes.
Courses with substantial makerspace engagement are still largely voluntary, though students might be motivated by distribution requirements or major requirements. We have extended the idea of academic makerspace engagement to include short exercises within existing classes. In this way, a student who might never consider entering the makerspace has a mandatory course experience, without requiring a large time commitment. An international relations class on American Foreign Policy brought 25 students through a drone rover exercise. The students assembled rovers and programmed beacons during one class in the makerspace, and brought them to a large space to execute a “humanitarian mission” simulation in the following class. Students reflected on the moral, ethical, and political elements of drones, and their impact on warfare and aid. In another interdisciplinary class, over 100 students studying “The Future of Jobs” had the chance to
build robots. A Gender in Science course brought students in to experience learning to code first-hand through a lesson with Arduino microcontrollers. The experience helped the students think about introductory computer science, a topic under discussion in the class. An Anthropology of Media class took apart cell phones, a practice in keeping with the anthropological methodology of "exploding objects" to really grapple with their materiality and think critically about components that are usually invisible and taken for granted. Additional classes bring students in for a tour, to invite students to use our resources for open ended projects. These classes include entrepreneurship classes, a capstone course in environmental studies, the Anthropology of Play, and “Love, Sex, and Death in the Anthropocene”, which asks many questions, including, “How does art speak within political conversations of climate change?”
The final way for students to engage with the space is through independent projects, which may be personal or academic. Each semester, we solicit proposals from students who seek modest funding and academic credit for projects. While we track data from students receiving funding from the makerspace, our numbers are small so far.
As we grew from our first two years of operation into our newly renovated space, we implemented different systems to track usage, and are interested in how well we reached all different majors at the college, and how this changed over time. Figure 3a shows the self-reported majors of participants who signed up for one of the twenty workshops offered in the first two years of operation. Double majors are counted twice, and individual students who sign up for multiple workshops are counted only once. “Interdisciplinary” includes international relations, which consists of humanities and social science classes, and environmental studies, which requires a mix of humanities, social science, and science courses. In our first year, 225 individuals registered for workshops, with about 200 reporting their majors, which includes 30 different majors. Figure 4 shows the majors across the college for comparison, as recorded by the registrar in spring 2019. (Only small shifts have occurred from 2015 through 2019). Since students must declare their majors after three semesters, the low numbers of “undeclared” suggests we were not reaching as many younger students as we would like. We do see that computer science is substantially overrepresented, and the non-arts humanities are underrepresented in the workshops.
Figure 3b shows the distribution of majors reached by academic coursework in the first two years, which included 27 different courses over four semesters, some courses being offered every semester. We see a larger percentage of non-STEM majors (81%), compared to our workshops (64%), suggesting that both short and substantial engagement with the makerspace as a part of a course is an effective way to reach majors beyond the sciences and the arts. The majors of the students in the courses were acquired from the registrar in the summer of 2017, and may not be the major declared while taking the course. Comparing these numbers to Fig 4, we see that 80% of our students do have non-STEM majors, but art and architecture are overrepresented, along with social sciences. This is unsurprising given the particular classes that brought larger numbers of students through the makerspace in those years. Additionally, students may have been undeclared when they enrolled in the class, but not when the majors data were acquired.
Figure 5 shows data of student users from 2019, after the new Fimbel Maker & Innovation Lab opened its doors. In this new space, all users are required to agree to act in accordance to our values and sign a waiver that applies if they work on non-academic projects. We had 424 individual students sign these documents in about five months of being open (not including summer months), pulling the information at the beginning of October 2019. We see that the users as measured in this way in our new space reflect our student population much better than our measures from the first two years. Arts are still over-represented, and we can directly look at the class year of the students to help us interpret the low numbers of undeclared students. Seniors represent 24% of current users, juniors 25%, sophomores 33%, and first years only 18%. However, the first years only had one month to discover the space when we pulled this data.
While our environment offers many opportunities, we have faced a range of challenges in these first two years, some of which are related to the small size of our school and our student population.
The workshops face the challenge of generating reliable interest and availability for our overcommitted students to attend, given their voluntary nature. With a larger student population, a very small fraction need to be available in order to run a successful 10 – 20 person workshop.
Courses offered in the makerspace assure deep engagement, with mandatory projects attached to classes increasing the likelihood that students engage in a meaningful way with the design process and the tools. The challenge is to find faculty available to teach these project based courses. Most of the science and studio art professors must teach courses for the major or service courses for other majors. For perspective, computer science has 6.5 FTE faculty, physics 4.5, and studio art five. With so few faculty, it is difficult to offer creative elective classes tailored to non-majors.
The one-time experience opens up possibilities to many more faculty, with the challenge of informing faculty across disciplines about the possibilities, and assisting those unfamiliar with the technologies to generate ideas that fit into existing courses. Our small community does make it easier to more quickly reach out directly to individuals and spread the word. A larger faculty means there is a higher likelihood to find people already knowledgeable or interested teaching classes that can easily incorporate a lesson. We are doing outreach to the faculty to help them understand that the makerspace is a resource that can enhance their pedagogy, and our staff will help them develop or teach lessons.
Staffing the space continues to be a significant challenge. We have 2.25 FTE professional technical staff, and hire 12-15 paid student workers to keep our space open in the evenings. Our training course helps students with basic skills on the equipment, but they are not ready to troubleshoot and help others immediately after the course. Few students presently enter Mount Holyoke with significant relevant knowledge, though this may change over time. Our student workers develop skills and confidence over time, but maintaining continuity of knowledge remains challenging. A large number of students study abroad in their junior year, and requiring the training course limits the number of first year students we can hire. We hope that as we grow the number of students engaged with the space, a student organization will develop that might fill some gaps through student run events and training, along with the potential for volunteers in the space to take on some responsibilities.
The Fimbel Maker & Innovation Lab at Mount Holyoke strives to embody the liberal arts experience while remaining conscious of assumptions and barriers that students bring with them upon entering. In particular, not only do most lack a technical background, they are hesitant to acquire it. This lack of technical penchant poses a barrier across campus, particularly outside of the STEM disciplines. For example, in entrepreneurship classes, students initially brainstorm social solutions to global and local problems and must be pushed to consider technical solutions. This is in contrast to one author’s previous experience teaching in a business school at a state university, with a class full of white men, who immediately brainstorm technical solutions. We plan to hold an entrepreneurship course in the space, and expect this to generate more tangible and technical endeavors.
Over the past four years, we have dramatically expanded our user base, at least by some measures. Much of our assessment is ongoing, as this is an initial report on the successes and challenges of our liberal arts makerspace. We have developed an entry system that records students who come to the space and requests a very short form to be filled out. We have an online registration system for some equipment that records names. We have pre- and post- surveys in iDesign, Engineering for Everyone, and the Fundamentals of Maker Culture course, which examine self-efficacy and sense of belonging, but we do not yet have enough students from these courses to come to any conclusions. It is challenging to determine whether the shorter experiences have a meaningful impact on students’ perceptions of themselves or technology. Anecdotally, one student who entered planning a music major enrolled in iDesign Studio and is now working at Google. A theater major attended the costume making workshop and was inspired to enroll in a computer science course. One student in an entrepreneurship class used our facilities to prototype a product, launched a successful kickstarter campaign, and is now running her business full-time after graduating.
Attracting diverse students is critical. Retaining people who walk through the doors is equally important. While music, art, and entrepreneurship may bring people who do not consider themselves fluent with technology into the makerspace, we need a collaborative environment that makes it clear that everyone has something to offer. There are many students who think that art is unapproachable, that foreign languages and cultures are intimidatingly incomprehensible, or who would prefer to only tackle technical problems in isolation. Craftspeople and artists can elevate the level of making with expertise in textiles , fashion, and more. Psychologists and sociologists can design a more impactful user or audience experience. The historian might recreate older, yet still impactful, ways of interacting with the material world. It is our hope that participants entering the space will observe the diversity of role-models already engaged and see themselves as welcomed. The diverse leadership strives to identify barriers to underrepresented groups, creating policies and training that lead to an inclusive space The majority of our users do not enter with extensive knowledge and experience, and do not look like the stereotypical people seen programming, woodworking, or machining. Our student workers embody this diversity of backgrounds and experience, and have been key in building community in the space without making it exclusive or intimidating, which our training course helps them to understand is an ongoing process.
A makerspace can bring together students in a way that empowers them to overcome preconceptions of their interests and capabilities. We continue to build our hands-on course offerings, and are reaching out to faculty, helping them to understand how the makerspace can support their learning goals. Our goal is to infuse the four year Mount Holyoke experience with educational technology experiences, improving the technical literacy of all our students and attracting some students from underrepresented groups into engineering and computer science careers, or careers that embrace technological innovation in any field. Providing access to facilities for interested students is a first step. Trained workers ready to help keep students returning. A thoughtful pedagogical approach to engaging new users allows us to spark interests and build confidence among diverse groups. We are also extending our reach beyond our walls, holding workshops for middle school and high school girls, and collaborating with organizations like Girls Inc. and Boys and Girls Club. HackHolyoke, the gender-balanced regional hackathon founded by one of the first iDesign Studio students, exemplifies our goal of Tech for All.
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