Today's Featured Author: Dave Wilson, Vice President of Product Marketing, Academic As Vice President of Product Marketing for Academic, Dave Wilson leads the global team responsible for ensuring adoption, proficiency, and growth of NI’s academic business.

The maker movement is having undeniable effects on our everyday lives. Whole communities are forming, new tools are appearing, innovative designs are emerging, and our general sense of empowerment is soaring. Of the many outcomes of this trend, one that always amazes me is the rapid turnaround time from idea to physical item. That is, how quickly people can go from having an idea—to holding a prototype of that idea in their hands.

At first, this trend made simple things like coasters, bookmarks, phone cases and bobble heads much more accessible. But the technical community quickly understood that 3D printers and laser cutters were capable of much more sophisticated things, like creating assembly elements that could be combined to make complex, innovative, and new things— things like robot elements, printed drones, and mechanical arms just to name a few.

The capabilities of the maker movement are inspiring students to pursue studies in science and engineering due to the near-instant realization of their imaginations. Today’s students are part of the video game era where whole adventures could be undertaken with instant, real-time feedback in self-guided adventures. The mismatch created by this instant interaction with the slow pace of education was a big disappointment to many students. But along came the tools of the maker movement to meet these students’ faster expectations.

Maker tools also help calibrate students to the realities of the physical world, which are quite different from the simulated one. Video games sidestepped the inconvenience of the real world. Items like friction, forces, and thermals, were ignored in many virtual worlds. But eventually, we all need to physically engage. And then, it’s necessary to acknowledge all the surrounding forces and effects. And now with maker movement tools, students can quickly try out their ideas and experience the interactions for themselves. It’s this immersion into reality that generates intuition in students. Instead of abstracting the effects of equations, students can actually apply them and see how they play out in reality. This is where a transformation from equation to useful tool happens and students view the world as a place to exercise their math.

Nearly every university we’ve visited in the last two years either has a maker space, or is building one. Students love these spaces and occupy them around the clock. Projects and study are conducted here. The link between engineering and math is played out over and over. These maker education spaces are also relatively safe. 3D printers and laser cutters are simply safer than grinders, drill presses, lathes, and CNC machines. These spaces are becoming as important a draw for prospective students as the athletic facilities.

Companies including QualComm, Autodesk, National Instruments, and General Motors have made contributions to bring the Jacobs Institute for Design Innovation at UC Berkeley to life.

The maker movement is already completely changing the engineering education game. As students see immediately that the theory they learn has exciting and relevant implications, they’re more motivated to learn and apply. As each equation gains relevance, there is motivation to use it as an element of their innovation. Students armed with relevant theory and practical application experience are our next-generation innovators and entrepreneurs. Combining the aspects of rapid physical development with fast turn electronics development and efficient graphical programming provide the triad of technologies that create deployable intelligent devices. This is where it all comes together for students to apply theory and rapidly deliver the advanced and useful products of the future.

It’s clear that our technology developments are moving at a faster and faster pace. But it’s also clear that our students are, too. We’re seeing freshmen students competing with robots that they’ve created in their first two semesters, and then creating near commercial-quality products just four semesters later. So the demand to keep up with accelerating needs is being met by the fusion of rapid design technologies and good old-fashioned theory and eager students ready to do engineering.

But we’re just getting started. New advances in maker-inspired tools are appearing every day. Fast, high-resolution 3D prints are arriving, highly conductive printed traces are being demonstrated, metal deposition is becoming more accessible.  Combine this with advances in software, processors, and materials and we’re all set to race into the future with our next generation of students, who wouldn’t have it any other way.                          

Learn more about how we're transforming the future here.