Makerspace Student Leaders Travel to ISAM
Students from the University of Pittsburgh’s Makerspace Leadership Team took a trip across the pond to Sheffield, United Kingdom for the recent International Symposium on Academic Makerspaces (ISAM).
At the symposium, students presented two posters that explored the effects of interdisciplinarity and integration of curriculum into a makerspace community. Both drew on the team’s own experience, projects they’ve completed and classes they’re involved in.
“Many people stopped to ask us about workshops and what makes them work,” said Kara Nghiem, team president and a senior studying bioengineering at Pitt’s Swanson School of Engineering. “We also received advice from other spaces to help us gather more information on general usage of our spaces, which the team is super excited to bring back and work on implementing.”
Nghiem also took part in a student-led panel discussion about their experiences as leaders in makerspaces and noted that despite each makerspace’s uniqueness in how they evolved, they still face similar challenges, like the recruitment of non-engineering students.
As a team, the group said they felt inspired after hearing makerspace leaders’ passion and vision, which motivated students to bring further change and innovation to their own community at Pitt.
“I'm hoping it will give us the push we need to be able to make lasting change,” Nghiem said. “In addition, as we've built our own goals for this year, bouncing ideas off others who have a wide variety of experiences with makerspaces has helped us to reframe how we think about those goals and get creative in thinking about how we can achieve them.”
ISAM is the preeminent annual meeting for the academic makerspace community. Over a span of 3 days every autumn, more than faculty, staff, students, and industry leaders gather to share makerspace knowledge, experience and inspiration in order to maximize impact on both the student learning experience and alumni success.
Other team members that attended included student engineers Lauren Beck, Sarah Shegogue, Andrea Moore and Natan Herzog. They were joined by Daniel Yates and Amelia Dubendorf from the Innovation and Entrepreneurship program in Pitt’s Swanson School, which provides administrative support to student leadership.