UC San Diego Hosts Maker Space Symposium

Panel of experts from the Maker community at the Southern California InnovationMaker3 Symposium

The Southern California InnovationMaker3 Symposium was held at the Jacobs School of Engineering at the University of California San Diego on Thursday, June 16, 2016.

The symposium is the second in a series of three events that bring together community college faculty interested in bringing maker spaces to their campuses with experts from the Maker community.

The events are presented by the California Community Colleges Chancellor's Office (CCCCO) Workforce & Economic Development Division and the California Council on Science and Technology (CCST).

Nate Delson

“Jacobs School Dean Albert P. Pisano’s vision is for all engineers to have hands-on experience starting freshman year,” said Nate Delson, professor in the Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering (MAE) Department and faculty director of the EnVision Arts and Engineering Maker Studio at UC San Diego.

Delson gave a talk at the event. “We already had some small maker spaces such as the Design Studio in the MAE Department. EnVision is unique because all six engineering departments and the Visual Arts department are using it for classes.”

“We chose to hold this meeting at UC San Diego in order to connect Southern California community colleges with people like Nate Delson, because the fact that UC San Diego has a maker studio makes it a great trajectory for their students who are interested in making,” said Susan Hackwood, Executive Director of CCST.

Delson believes that maker spaces allow students to learn not just how to use a screwdriver, but all sorts of different tools in one space. He had advice for attendees: “Don’t leave the creation of a culture to chance – create a culture of inclusion and excellence. A maker space should be welcoming to students of all abilities by using techniques such as warm-up modules that bring all students up to speed on use of the fabrication tools. One of my favorite quotes is  ‘Hands on, minds on, hearts on’.”

Each symposium included the presentation of the recently released report: "Promoting Engagement of the California Community Colleges with the Maker Space Movement," authored by CCST. The report is a guide to develop a sustainable network which aligns with the educational goals of the Community Colleges while preserving the uniquely independent culture of the maker space.

The first of the three was held at UC Berkeley on June 13.

Structural Engineering and Visual Arts Students To Exhibit Final Projects Mar. 14-17

Students from a structural engineering and a visual arts class are working together, shoulder to shoulder, on a collaborative final project. They will showcase the results of this collaboration at the Envision: The Future is Here exhibition. 

The projects will be on public display in the Structural and Materials Engineering building, rooms 201 and 202, Mar. 14-17, from 10:00 a.m. - 5:00 p.m each day, with a reception to be held on the 17th at 7:00 p.m. 

This experimental class, happening in the new EnVision Maker Studio at UC San Diego, blends the pedagogical needs of artists and engineers. The goal is for the students to work collectively to create a “whole object” where the aesthetics and design of the sub-structure and art object are integrated in such a way that they work together aesthetically, conceptually, and structurally.

The artist in each group led the design and 3D printing or other assembly method for a 3D object representing their idea of science fiction. The engineers took the lead on the surrounding structure. Some of the projects include:

• A squid monster sculpture on a pagoda-style structure
• A suspended car sculpture 
• A third team is constructing something akin to the big tic-tac-toe systems you see in playgrounds

Learn more about EnVision here.

Freshman bioengineering students 3D print bones in hands-on class

UC San Diego bioengineering undergraduates are close to wrapping up the winter quarter of a new hands-on bioengineering course designed to expose freshmen to central topics and tools of bioengineering work on three hands-on projects. The class meets in the new EnVision Maker Studio at UC San Diego and is part of the Jacobs School's Experience Engineering Initiative.

* Electrophysiology
* Glucose monitoring for the blind
* 3-D bone printing

Rachel Daniels, a student in the class, says she learned a lot about the human spine from the bone printing project.

"By analyzing real life CT scans we were able to pull important data, allowing us to print a replica of the T10 vertebrae using plastic printing material," she said. "Once several prints were made we tested the correlation between load and displacement in the inter-vertebral disks by simply placing varying forces upon the vertebrae and measuring displacement. We concluded the heavier the load, the larger the total displacement until a plateau was reached."

We wrote about the very first iteration of this experiential bioengineering course in Pulse magazine last summer.

Below are images from the course.

Tools used include BioRadios, MATLAB, CAD software, 3D printers, foam cutters, hand tools.