David Gillette, Michael Haungs, Jane Lehr, Elizabeth Lowham
California Polytechnic State University
Blank Line
In 2012, the Liberal Arts and Engineering Studies program at Cal Poly (San Luis Obispo), and the Center for Expressive Technologies (CET) were asked to collaborate with a local art museum, the mayor’s office, local businesses, and an emerging “maker community” to produce the first-ever Mini-Maker Faire for the San Luis Obispo community. This seemed to be a perfect “real-world” learning project for the programs. Maker fairs appear to be an ideal joining point between studies in engineering and liberal arts. Producing this first Maker Faire for the city also seemed like it would be of great social and educational benefit to the local community. What could go wrong? Plenty, especially when the need for high-quality academic instruction, course delivery and learning assessment came into direct conflict with the political and organizational needs of a city putting on its first major technology-arts festival. Academic needs quickly took a back door to the immediate, unavoidable issues of resolving complex financial issues; resolving political issues of project ownership, responsibility, and health and safety concerns; and resolving labor issues for building and running a large, day-long festival held at the historical center of the city. Our LAES program worked with the Maker Faire process for two years (2013–2014), and CET for three, each year both programs struggled in different ways to reconcile the academic needs of the university with the social/political needs of the community. Our presentation reviews this process of discovery, experimentation, failure, success, and resolution, while also noting how many of the specific issues of our Maker Faire collaboration are similar to issues many interdisciplinary programs face when connecting real-world, community-based projects to effective project-based learning, especially when also trying to combine studies in Engineering with those in Liberal Arts.