For example, one might make creative efforts like fire-breathing robots as performance art, combining contributions from community members with electrical, mechanical, and embedded systems know-how. Making comes from an imaginative, creative mind-space, and is often done outside the confines of established engineering education curricular activities. Individuals and groups embark on projects of all sorts, led primarily by their interests and curiosities, informed by their skills or the skills they want to learn. The range of expertise could be large, but novices and experts alike share an enthusiasm and appreciation for building and creation. The label “Maker” is a self-determined one assigned by affinity with or involvement in a larger Maker community. Makers are do-it-yourself-minded individuals participating in informal communities (doing it with others) that support and celebrate building and prototyping technical proof-of-concept exploration and ad hoc product development. This paper expands on the collection methods used in order to inform others of possible approaches for understanding the skills learned and pathways taken by a sector of the adult community who embodies many of the qualities important to the engineer of the future.Ī Maker is a modern-day tinkerer and hands-on doer and fashioner of stuff. A combination of qualitative techniques was used for data collection including a screening questionnaire, artifact elicitation interviews, and critical incident interviews. To see what events and skills make an engineer, we explored the life pathways of Makers, a self-identified group of creatives that bridge across many areas of technical and non-technical expertise. This paper explores one method for discovering how engineers are made, both through traditional and non-traditional processes.
To better understand how engineering education manifests during a lifetime, and how engineering skills and mindsets can be acquired later post-college, we seek to understand how skills, knowledge, and tacit knowledge are built.
These qualities are important for, and learned within, a wide range of practices. The identified qualities include the ability to engage in lifelong learning, function creatively, work across disciplines, practical ingenuity, and the ability to communicate with broader audiences in addition to maintaining technical expertise in engineering fields. The National Academies Engineer of 2020 (National Academy of Engineering 2004) and ABET, the US accreditation body for engineering programs (ABET 2012, 2014, 2015) have both identified a wide range of qualities that are vital for future engineers. Engineering is increasingly understood as a lifelong learning pathway rather than an event that happens only in a university setting.
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