Will the First-Year Makers Please Stand Up? Understanding What Drives Student Choices in a First-Year Maker Experience

The proliferation of Makerspaces across institutions of higher education is due in large part to their ability to engage students in hands-on activities, fostering higher levels of engineering self-efficacy and confidence in engineering abilities amongst students. It is especially important for first-year students to participate in these spaces to amplify their self-confidence, creativity, and problem-solving skills early in their college experience to increase a sense of belonging. One critical issue many university Makerspaces face, however, is the necessity to scale hands-on, often time-intensive, experiences across a large population of undergraduate engineering students. At The Pennsylvania State University, the Learning Factory has designed and developed multiple “maker modules” for our first-year engineering design course, which serves ~650 students per semester. This first-year maker experience allows students to choose from five projects: Aluminum Pen, Embroidery, LED Acrylic Display, Wireless Charger Housing, and Ultrasonic Range Finder. Each of these projects has been developed to engage students in different parts of the Learning Factory Makerspace through using tools in the woodshop and textiles shop or via 3D printing and laser cutting. As a first step to understanding how students interact with the makerspaces through this course project, this paper focuses on understanding what projects the students prefer and why. In this paper, we report on the ranked order data from student project preference as well as responses collected through an open-ended survey question to understand more about how students choose their projects. Our results show that students often favored the LED Acrylic Display, Wireless Charger Housing, and Aluminum Pen project because they were motivated to have “something cool” at the end of the class project. For the Embroidery and Ultrasonic Range Finder projects, students were more motivated by the process of making and learning through the project. While this work shows us that motivations do differ based on projects and that more students preferred certain projects, we do not yet know how demographics and self-efficacy play a role in these motivations, and therefore, more work is required to unpack these motivations.