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Spring 2023 Grants

making@stanford funds fifty proposals across Funding Programs: Maker Fellows, Making Mentors, Making Materials, Making Equipment, and Research on Making in Education

With a dedicated focus on bolstering the backbone of our educational ecosystem—the individuals who directly nurture and guide our students, including faculty members, instructors, mentors, and student staff—a total of fifty proposals originating from thirteen distinct departments across four Schools have been successfully funded through the Spring 2023 Funding Programs. 

Examples of funded projects include:

  • materials, tools, and assistant support for successful making@stanford 2022-23 pilot courses in Geophysics and Silversmithing 
  • materials for courses in costume design, photography, haptics, and bio-making
  • assistant support for a new Anthropology IntroSem 
  • student staffing support across several programs and making spaces

     

Updates on funded courses, projects, and new programs will be available below as they are implemented.  

Bioengineering

BIOE 261: 3D Bioprinting Laboratory

This class had 13 students, represented by undergrads, masters, and PhD students, learn through a series of workshops. Student assembled 3D bioprinters, then learned how to use them in bio applications by printing a tri-leaflet heart valve, printing into tissue, and staining human tissues to assess cell behavior in printed inks among other workshops. Final student group projects ranged from building electronic sensors to enable automated nozzle alignment, to designing and making low-cost 3D printed auger dispensers, to 3D printing human heart cells to form a beating bio-pump with a valve.

Theater & Performance Studies

TAPS28: Stage Makeup

Hands-on instruction and practice was a core element of this class as students learned techniques of make-up application and design for the actor and artist including corrective, age, character, and fantasy.

Art & Art History

Enlargers for Photography Lab Dark Room

This grant awarded funding for enlargers in the Art Department's Photography Lab. This lab supports a variety of core art studio classes and higher level conceptual photography classes. Materials were also funded for one of the core photo classes, ARTSTUDI 170: Light and Shadow.

Bioengineering

BIOE44: Fundamentals for Engineering Biology Lab

The lab course expanded its toolkit of fermenting bioplastic polymers from sugar-containing growth media using living biomanufacturing microbial strains. Undergraduate students collaborated with making mentors to design, construct, and optimize DNA sequences for bioplastic-producing bacterial strains, resulting in the successful production and characterization of biopolymers with improved properties.

Music (CCRMA)

Expanded Curriculum in Physical Interaction Design and Musical Acoustics

The CCRMA Max Lab supports the making of musical instruments, where students pair understanding in music and composition with physical making. The cornerstone class, MUSIC250A, continues to dazzle with a wide range of unique student projects, now with expanded access to design and making elements for their instruments.

Theater and Performance Studies

TAPS Makerspace Restock!

Infusing our Technology Makerspace and Design Lab with new materials to make our spaces exciting places to create theatre related art! We build set models, draw and paint, craft molds for stage prosthetics, make wigs, construct clothes and much more!

Theater and Performance Studies

World of Wearable Art -2024

An exploration of how art and clothes intersect.   Rana Regina, our alien frog princess was entered into the World of Wearable Art, an international wearable art competition in New Zealand.  Making@stanford provided essential materials and support for students to create this garment as well as sample other ideas. 

Theater and Performance Studies

Supporting our Design classes! Stage Makeup and Theatre Design

Making@stanford graciously funded supplies so our students could explore new and exciting methods and materials in the world of Stage Makeup and Theatre Design.  From fake wounds to old age makeup, set models to lighting equipment, the work that is coming out of these classes is next level! 

Art & Art History

Printmaking Mentors

Thanks to making@stanford, we were able to hire our very first printmaking studio mentors. Printmaking involves intricate processes and setup, and having mentors available to answer questions has enabled students to swiftly dive into ambitious printing techniques, fostering a strong sense of community within the printmaking studio.

Art & Art History

New Art Practice Laser Cutter

Thanks to the generous support from the Making Funds, Art Practice has proudly acquired its first professional-grade laser cutter, now located in the Sculpture Lab. This cutting-edge equipment will be accessible to all art practice classes, exposing more students to our exceptional physical making resources.

Applied Physics

Expanded Radio Frequency Experiments and Projects for Applied Physics 207

This grant supported new equipment and instruments for students to explore radio-frequency techniques. Class projects included a demonstration of Spread-Spectrum Communication methods, and the grant supported new RF cavities and oscillators to explore the Pound-Drever-Hall method of locking an oscillator to an external resonator.

Mechanical Engineering

ME170: Mechanical Engineering Capstone course

This year’s class consisted of 64 students working over two quarters, spread across 16 teams working on different real-world projects from external organizations. The funding from making@stanford is used to help the students build and test their prototypes against the requirements that they establish. Building, making and testing are central components to the ME170 course and learning experience.  Projects included solutions for children in Tanzania with Cerebral Palsy, grid-scale energy storage solutions, and ski binding systems to avoid ACL tears, among others.

Bioengineering

Engineering microbes to build bioplastics

The BIOE 44: Fundamentals for Engineering Biology Lab course collaborated with a team of making mentors to engineer cells to build bioplastics and explore the sustainable polymer manufacturing space. Excitingly, the student teams collected initial evidence that the bioplastics produced by the engineered microbial strains may have longer polymer chains and higher molecular mass compared with the output from an initial production strain, a design goal the teams were hoping to achieve as this increased length improves the commercial properties of the material.

Bioengineering

A Frugal CRISPR Kit for Students to Learn Gene Editing and Synthetic Biology for Equitable Education

We have utilized our funding to develop CRISPRkit, an affordable kit designed for gene editing in classroom biotechnology education. CRISPRkit has been successfully used by students in the BIOE44 class and by iGEM participants to learn about gene editing concepts and techniques. We also created a user-friendly website to help disseminate this resource, supported by Making@Stanford. CRISPRkit eliminates the need for specialized equipment, prioritizes biosafety, and uses cost-effective reagents, offering a novel and accessible educational opportunity for high school students interested in exploring the forefront of biological technology.

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