Young engineers find their passion at Frith First-Year Makerspace

What we're trying to do here is bring more students into the Frith Makerspace. These are all first-year General Engineering students. We want them to feel welcome in engineering. We want them to explore all the possibilities that are available to them and get a little experience doing hands on engineering, where they produce a product that they can take home with them. Today, what we have is a Halloween themed activity. We have some Halloween decorations with an Arduino that they'll put inside a with a switch, and a motion sensor that goes into the decoration. As you scan over it. The lights are supposed to light up, and then you're also supposed to hear a sound come out of the speaker. [LAUGHING] It's so fun, I love putting things together. Working here at the Frith Lab is not something new to me. It's just a new environment. But, I really like it like I want to be a mechanical engineer. So, this is the type of environment that I really want to be in, being hands on, working with stuff. It's also a place where they can interact with students that have actually selected an engineering major. Talk about making, talk about engineering, and kind of help them explore a little bit more what all the major options are. For me, it's at least helped clarify a lot of topics. I find it's a lot easier to learn or at least review material by helping others with it. Also, I come from a background of a lot of mechatronics, it's been really fun being able to apply that knowledge to other people's problems and help them with what they're working on. Also, it's just really inspiring to see the different projects that people work on because it's a lot of things that I never would have thought of, but it's really cool to see people actually going out and doing that.