Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering at Georgia Tech created the Invention Studio in 2009. Reacting to growing industry demand for engineering students with hands-on experience, the George W. These policies, described below and packaged in the appendices, may serve to inspire readers who are facing similar challenges with the growth of their student-led makerspaces. After the implementation of the checklist training program in 2014, the Invention Studio saw a decrease in the occurrence of recordable work-related injuries, as defined by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA).
Without existing procedures to accommodate rapid growth, the Invention Studio developed a series of policies to mitigate administrative concerns over safety and quality of service. Despite the numerous proven benefits of student leadership in campus makerspaces, student-run makerspaces are uncommon, due in part to skepticism about the efficacy of student oversight in maintaining a reliably safe workshop environment.įFounded in 2009, the Invention Studio has grown steadily in terms of staffing, space, and impact on campus culture.
The student supervision of the space creates a unique environment that fosters campus community involvement in “maker culture,” which is shown to have a positive impact on the professional development of students in STEM majors. Higher Education Makerspaces such as the Invention Studio provide a low barrier of entry to hands-on prototyping and fabrication relative to the classic machine shop model. The Invention Studio at Georgia Tech is a free-to-use student-run makerspace that serves all students, faculty, and staff of the Georgia Institute of Technology. Data on equipment usage and users were analyzed to draw conclusions. The training methods rely on inculcating a sense of ownership and trust among the students who staff and maintain the makerspace. This paper presents a novel training protocol that has demonstrated that a makerspace run by students can indeed be safe and accessible. Hence, safety is a cause for concern in a student-run makerspace. Students are perceived as having lesser experience and training when compared to typical machinists serving in traditional academic support machine shops. School of Mechanical Eng., Georgia Institute of Technology email: of Electrical and Computer Eng., Georgia Institute of Technology email: School of Mechanical Eng., Georgia Institute of Technology email: of Industrial Design, Georgia Institute of Technology email: School of Mechanical Eng., Georgia Institute of Technology email: Abstract Spencer 3, Veronica Spencer 4, and Priyesh B.
Safety in a Student-Run Makerspace via Peer-to-Peer Adaptive TrainingĪmit Jariwala 1, Tim Felbinger 2, Thomas L.