Activities & Resources

Do students understand concepts better after completing a making activity aligned with the topic? We created a work-flow for a few signature topics to track making activities with learning outcomes. This included opportunities for formative and summative assessment as well as scaffolding the concepts in a way they built on previous experiences with that topic.

Enhance the quality of learning by students in a manufacturing processes course! Many of the activities were designed as stand-alone modules to give students exposure to the manufacturing technologies. By integrating the different processes via the design and construction of a single cohesive product, this encourages students to take on an entrepreneurial mindset and develop a design which adds value to the package as a whole.

This flexible hands-on project has students working in teams to create an inexpensive visual aid that illustrates a class concept, then using it to teach someone. This can be either a single large homework assignment or a multi-part semester project, and is a great way to provide a hands-on experience in large lecture classes without lab sections. In its expanded form, it provides an opportunity for students to engage with the university maker spaces and fabrication facilities and explore how maker spaces can promote the three Cs: cultivating curiosity, making connections, and creating value.

This card details a project implemented into an Introduction to CAD (computer aided design) course that allows students to take their ideas from the computer and realize them in physical space. Students bring their own cultures and backgrounds into the project while thinking more deeply about their futures as engineers. Through this project they gain familiarity with several makerspace tools and processes.

A first-year engineering course at the University of New Haven was redesigned to add the benefits of learning in the makerspace into an existing design and customer-awareness term project. This modification allowed students to be curious about new technology and create better prototypes to then test and collect feedback from selected stakeholders, enhancing their ability to make connections and create value.

User-centered design activities will help students build with purpose. This series of cards offers several different hands-on activities to promote technical skill development in the engineering classroom. The central theme of these activities centers around creation of assistive technology to aid people living with disabilities. However, many of the activities can be easily adapted to meet any engineering discipline looking for hands-on workshops for technical skill development.

90% of students surveyed stated their confidence in their knowledge of control systems was higher when hardware is used for labs as opposed to only simulation. Control systems theory is taught in many engineering disciplines; however, few designs exist for experimental lab setups that can be built and used at home for remote learning. This card presents an activity where students use foam core board and hot glue to build their own mechanical system and then control it using a kit of parts, including tools, that costs less than $100.

This activity engages first-year engineering students on the implementation of a product to support vision-impaired individuals in their daily activities with the final goal of helping them to gain independence, allowing them to interact within the environment in a more natural, regular, and transparent way instead of having to adapt themselves to the environment. Students learn about the impact that technology and the human-computer interaction could have in the ultimate experience of an vision-impaired individual and other involved stake-holders (educators, family, health services providers) in a world that hast not been adjusted for visual-impaired individuals.

Mechanical engineering students should get right into building and making. Much of what they will learn across the undergraduate mechanical engineering curriculum is about building as well as analyzing built things or the characteristics/behaviors of physical phenomena. By introducing a collaborative making project very early in the course, the hope is to get students excited, introduce them to working collaboratively and creatively to solve problems, and make some implicit link to the 3Cs, especially making connections and spurring curiosity.

Students in this course fabricate basic machines that give life to stories of their own design! Teach students the basic elements of mechanical systems while emphasizing the underlying physical principles. Students will develop an understanding of the principles and workings of elements such as linkages, cams, and gears, which generate and convey mechanical motions. They will also investigate the mechanics of storytelling and explore the historical and creative relationship between automaton and narrative.

Create a balance sculpture that appears to defy gravity! Encourage making in a Statics course to reinforce the concepts of center of gravity and centroid. This activity can be facilitated as an individual project or homework assignment. Materials might include found or created objects ranging from household trinkets to parts generated using 3D printers.

The mechatronics course was designed to replace the traditional Electrical Circuits course, as the former was historically one of the lowest rated in the curriculum. The new course is now consistently one of the highest rated! A major goal of this curriculum revision is to see students demonstrating elements of the course (especially prototyping mechatronic designs) in subsequent courses, such as required courses like experimentation, capstone, or elective courses within the minors. To facilitate that the making lessons extend beyond the course, each student purchases a Mechatronics kit in lieu of a textbook. All materials, including interactive videos, are provided through the course website.