Makerspace Involvement and Academic Success in Mechanical Engineering

This Full Research paper presents a study to determine the correlations between student involvement in an academic makerspace and academic achievement as measured by GPA. University makerspaces are open environments designed to encourage creative collaborations and innovative exploration by providing students access to a variety of machines and tools typically focused on rapid prototyping. In an effort to understand the benefits these spaces in academia, there have been several studies on their founding and facilitation; however, there is a lack of data-driven studies of student involvement and the impact of makerspace use on student development. This paper presents preliminary results from an investigation to so show the impact of involvement in an academic makerspace on GPA. By measuring cohorts of students at different stages in the mechanical engineering curriculum, correlations are made between the level of involvement in makerspaces and GPA. The results indicate that students who use the space to build and create, either by choice or for a course requirement, have been shown to have a higher average in-major GPA than students who do not use the space. These findings and more encourage the further exploration of the impact of makerspaces through both quantitative and qualitative methods.