Abstract:

Makerspaces, which are open workspaces for collaboration, expand experiential learning opportunities since participants are empowered to drive initiatives. This paper presents insights on the impact of makerspace-based courses on the development of innovative behavior (IB) among undergraduate students. Although IB has been well-researched at the workplace, it has not been studied in the context of undergraduate education. In this study, we bridge this gap by adapting the entrepreneurial opportunity recognition (EOR) framework from workplace research to study IB in undergraduate makerspaces. This framework examines how interaction and networking in the workplace spark business ideas and solutions for new products, services, or customer base. While there are prior works on university makerspaces such as academic libraries or modules fostering design/technology self-efficacy and innovation orientation, we present findings based on credit-bearing courses that have incorporated elements of creativity to enhance IB that mimics an entrepreneurial mindset at the workplace.

The EOR model suggests that IB can be categorized into four dimensions including questioning, observing, experimenting/exploring, and idea networking. Survey questionnaires have been established to examine one’s IB in these four behavioral patterns. We have customized the survey for undergraduate study comprising items such as if one often asks questions that challenge the status quo/others’ fundamental assumptions, whether one regularly observes how others respond, if one has a continuous flow of new ideas by paying attention to everyday experiences, whether one frequently experiments to understand how things work and create new ways of doing things, and if one attends many diverse activities outside his/her discipline.

We conducted two surveys (pre- and post-course) across three different courses in our university involving students proposing projects of their interest and creating physical prototypes or developing proposals based on an ideation process. While these courses are part of the engineering curriculum, some courses are offered to students from other disciplines including arts and humanities. We compare the characteristics of the three makerspace-based courses such as duration, student profile, team formation, and degree of instructor involvement. We then suggest possible reasons that result in a greater positive impact on particular scales of IB. For instance, an engineering course had the highest rating for the experimenting/exploring category, implying the innovative approach toward designing prototypes while a design thinking course performed best for the observing dimension since students had to devise solutions to a real-life problem based on reading and discussions. To establish if there is a significant difference in students’ IB, we performed the non-parametric Wilcoxon signed-rank test comparing the first and second survey, with results showing that there is an increase in the ability to be innovative across the courses. In addition, we observed that students in these makerspaces acquired several soft skills such as empathy, brainstorming, user-centric, divergent, and convergent thinking, self-confidence, and teamwork. Therefore, this work serves to inform the international research community that these makerspace-based courses are not only able to develop students in terms of their IB but other important cognitive, social, and affective skills too.

Keywords:

Innovative behavior, undergraduate makerspace-based courses, entrepreneurial opportunity recognition framework, engineering education.