I am a senior at Fulton and will be going to Wichita State University next year. I have help built the makerspace from the ground up since its first days. First I was a member at the Techshop downtown in middle school. Our school received multiple memberships, this fueled my passion for building and creating anything and everything. The Techshop sadly closed but Dr. Urbano and I knew we had to built something like it at school. During my last year of middle school and Freshman year we applied to several diffrent grants. By the end of the year we received enough funding to build our dream space. The next year we had a laser cutting, 3D printer, vinyl cutter, heat press, a lot of wood working tools, and much more. Throughout the summer I helped build shelves and diffrent tables for the tools. At the beginning of my Sophomore year we started the makerspace business club. This allowed us to create high quality products to sell to the community and use the funding to grow and maintain the makerspace.
After we had everything working we started implementing it into classes. For physics class I built several diffrent small machines using the laser cutter. After building the machine and running test with it we learned all the physics behind the machine along with working out all the math. For chemistry class I built a 3D periodic table for my final. I choose to represent ionization energy, this meant the higher the block of wood for the element was the higher the ionization energy is. I labeled each block with its element name with the laser cutter and stained each element group a diffrent color. After talking with the english teacher I was abled to bring the makerspace into english class. After reading Macbeth I built a 3D model of one of the scenes. Some people see this as a way of getting out of harder projects. I believe it is the best way to learn and you get the most out of it. For english class it requires a lot of text analysis to make your model at realistic as possible. For physics class we aren't just reading about a machine in a text book, we are going to actually build the machine and run the experiment with it.
Outside of the business club and school projects I have used the space to build and create personal projects. Linked below are some of my favorites.
I also train most students how to use the tools at first and help teachers implement the space into the class room. Along with that I have built a personal business selling my creations. The first one is On the Rail Designs. On the Rail Designs builds high quality dressage letters for vinyl horse fencing. I had to design and build a machine to bend my acrylic in order to bend the letters. This year I designed several racing art pieces which I am selling to the local karting community. The lessons I have gained from these experience are so valuable! Through the makerspace blog I been recored most of my work which I can show at interviews and to colleges. This has already came to be very helpful more than once.
Throughout my time in the makerspace I have learned how to receive funding for your dreams, build a business, implement it into the classroom, and had so many more valuable experiences. Since I have enjoyed it so much I made sure the university I was going to had a space like it. It was very hard to find but I did in the end. This space has fueled my passion to build a succesfull business in the future and study entrepreneurship at Wichita State.
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