Student Sami Belcher is one of the makerspace managers who works in the Hatch It! Lab.
Angela Ballard was one of the first instructors at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga to use the brand-new Hatch It! Lab.
An adjunct professor in the Department of Interior Architecture and Design, she used it during spring semester 2021 for two courses that seem to neatly fit into a room full of sewing machines, 3D printers, laser cutters and other hands-on equipment.
Students in Ballard’s Nurturing Nature class were asked to create a device that could be used in the growing of plants. Publication Design students worked with a client to develop a promotional product.
“I assigned an overall learning objective for both that was focused on creative problem-solving, and the students took it from there,” Ballard said.
“Creative problem-solving is a skill that’s useful for students of all majors, regardless of their academic and professional goals. It’s one of the most valuable things you can bring to the table when you’re looking for a job, and it has tremendous personal value, too.”
Learning such skills is one of the objectives of the Hatch It! Lab, which opened in January 2021 and has had a successful first year, said Libby Santin, director of the Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship and the driver behind getting the lab—also known as a makerspace
—built in the first place.
In spring semester 2022 alone, 19 different classes used the lab, attracting everything from Feminist Science Fiction to Interior Systems Design to Entrepreneurship: The Mindset and Skillset, a course taught by Santin.
“Students make—oh my—all sorts of things. It’s so much fun,” she said. “Makerspaces are really popular in entrepreneurship curriculums because a lot of times students want to prototype a product or something like that.”
When the lab was being built, equipment cost about $60,000, Santin said. Materials—rolls of vinyl, wood pieces, sewing thread, 3D printer plastic, among other needs—will add about $8,000 each year, she said.
The lab’s abilities are wide-ranging. A photograph can be shaped with a vinyl cutter then adhered to a T-shirt with a heat press. Plastic devices can be built layer by layer in a 3D printer
Words written on paper can be embroidered onto fabric. A laser cutter can turn a piece of wood into a complex jigsaw puzzle.
Gale Iles, an associate professor of criminal justice, used the lab to make students in her Courts class think outside the box by building a box. A witness box.
“The idea that I settled on was to have them build a replica of a courtroom,” she said. “That replica will include miniature figurines that illustrate where the legal actors are located in the courtroom.”
Students in Chang Phuong’s Biometrics and Cryptography class used the lab’s 3D printer to build a plastic case about the size of a pack of cigarettes. Although small, it had to hold tiny parts—including a fully operational computer and a camera—to read fingerprints, a security measure against cyberattacks.
The lab is not just for making cool stuff, though. There are deeper lessons than that.
Some students are hesitant to embrace their creative ideas, afraid they’ll turn out poorly or seem stupid, Santin said. The Hatch It! Lab can lessen the nervousness.
“They decrease some of their fear around creativity. You may not know exactly what you’re doing or how to do it, but you have the ability to learn how to do something,” she said.
“They decrease some of their fear around creativity. You may not know exactly what you’re doing or how to do it, but you have the ability to learn how to do something,” she said.
Another lesson may seem counterintuitive to achieving student success—failure
” Their design does not come out in three dimensions as they have it in their mind, so they’ll have to start over again. Or when students bring their final project to class and it’s a failure and they’ll talk about why,” Santin said.
“It’s, ‘OK, so you failed at that. What did you learn from it? How are you going to fix it? How can you make it better?’
“It’s a lot of it’s self-learning.”
Ballard agreed.
“Perhaps you learn something big, like the fact that nobody is perfect or that you can do everything ‘right’ and still not succeed,” she said. “Maybe you simply learn what not to do next time.
“Every lesson in life can be valuable, perhaps most especially failure, and makerspaces are a terrific environment for that kind of learning.”
Faculty members can learn their own lessons in the lab, Santin said.
“I hope that professors realize that this is an alternative to giving a test or a quiz, and it’s much more experiential and hands-on,” she said.
“The feedback that I’ve gotten from professors who’ve done this is that students like it. It’s really fun. It’s different.”
