Making, in the context of student l

Making, in the context of student led project based learning, is producing young people and adults who possess valid engineering skills which are applicable to ABET accreditation. The Maker Mindset, with its focus on celebrating failure, learning through hands-on iteration, and collaboration between makers could well be adopted in some engineering courses to instill many of the ABET Student Outcomes as well as program specific criteria for electrical, mechanical, and manufacturing engineering. Specifically, the ability of Making as a form of project based learning to instill a high level of communications ability, strong collaboration skills, the ability for self-directed learning, and perseverance is valuable to traditional engineering programs. This value remains, in an accreditation sense, whether or not Student Outcomes are revised as proposed.

Additionally, maker faires and artifact elicitation interview protocols themselves offer a possible way for engineering educators to harness the Maker Mindset for their students. In a student driven, project based course, a mini-maker faire, the equivalent perhaps of an art class’s gallery final, combined with professors asking probing questions on the skills learned in the creation, successful or not, of a student’s artifact could lead to successfully accomplishing ABET Student Outcomes. While perhaps more time consuming than a multiple choice test, an instructor can clearly determine what skills were used in the creation of an artifact through a semi-structured interview with the student. The authors plan to delve more deeply into artifact elicitation as an evaluative method in further work.

This is not to suggest that Making takes the place of rigorous engineering training. As the data presented in this paper shows, there would be a clear need for the purposeful integration of higher level math into project based making. Making alone does not appear to teach the math skills needed for today’s engineer. The integration of higher mathematics into Making could come in the form of post-prototype write-ups. Engineering students could, as often occurs in professional product engineering settings, create and test rough prototypes of their ideas, then, once a working model is established, dig further into the design by creating mathematical models for the object in terms of durability, cost, efficiency, etc. Future research on how to best

integrate the qualities of a Maker Mindset with traditional engineering courses remains to be done, but the benefits of doing so are compelling.