Hello, I'm Maddie Hickman.
I'm in the School of Engineering.
I work in the active learning labs.
And I'm a mechanical engineer.
And I am presenting Project Night.
So we do a weekly event in the School of Engineering,
where people from all over Harvard
can come hang out, mixed up, and finally order pizza.
We run a workshop.
And the goal is just to get people in
and building stuff for fun outside of classwork.
So we have a team.
Myself and Elaine are in the active learning labs.
Daniel and Rob in the science center
in the physics department.
And we got a Spark grant in 2017 from HILT to run this.
And the reason we started working on this project
is because we all had awesome making experiences in college.
And when I first got to this job,
making outside of coursework was not really encouraged.
And we felt there was something that people should have access
to.
So this is one of my own experiences.
This is from an intro mechanics class.
I found it somewhat boring.
I had the same problem the year later
in an extracurricular team to build a solar electric car,
same problem much more exciting.
And so we kind of all had similar experiences,
where if you're doing something that's
self-directed and project-based, you have
a better context for learning.
You learn better.
You care about what you're working on.
It's fun.
You work with people.
There's a lot of other soft skills built into that.
So we want to kind of give students access to that
and also, take data to show that it was
an important part of education.
We also had specific requests-- and sorry,
there's a lot of words--
from students asking for making resources on campus.
And again, there's an Allston maker space
that's going to come here in a year or two.
So we wanted to help start a community that
could sort of poured into that space
and have access to the new maker space, but kind of already
have an existing community.
So that led to Project Nights.
Again, we've been doing this for two years now.
This is a weekly event that we run.
One evening a week we open up the space,
the shop, no background required.
We teach people how to build stuff.
We run stuff, like bicycle month.
That's this month.
Electronics, people, again, with no background
can come in and learn how to work with microcontrollers,
build circuits.
People build things for their dorm rooms.
And it's a nice community of people from all over campus,
students, staff, et cetera.
And we bring people in who, again, have never built stuff
and teach them how to do that and learn
from each other as well, which is a nice kind of part
of the community.
So we've had 46 weekly events so far over the last two years.
We averaged 21 attendees per event,
again, mix of undergrads, grads, staff, students, alum.
And sorry this is super, super small,
but we've been taking data to hopefully show that this
is impactful for students.
So this is on the poster.
Happy to talk more about this later,
but the dark bars are people sort of extreme confidence
levels.
Later bars are lower confidence.
And you can see a general shift from before
attending Project Night to after attending Project Night.
People get a lot more confident in things like design, building
stuff, electronics, et cetera.
And we've also tried to show that Project Night has
an effect on people's motivation in STEM courses,
sense of community in the School of Engineering,
and again large shift towards extremely positive impact
that Project Night has had on people's experience.
And this is all survey data.
We're hoping to continue this over the next year or longer,
hopefully.
So again, impacts, we've had a huge increase
in sort of the making culture in the School of Engineering,
bringing people from all over the campus together.
We've been able to test course projects
through that community.
People learn from each other.
We learn from the students.
And the students have really liked the access to the shops
after hours.
They love the community from kind of around campus.
They like pizza that we get them.
And they like sort of access to a diverse range of projects.
So we're hoping to continue this kind of this year, next year,
into the, future keep running weekly events.
For anyone that's interested, we're
happy to have folks participate, help run things,
join the community.
Happy to talk more to other people who
are working on similar stuff.
That's my email address.
And we also wanted to give a huge thank you
to HILT, who has made this possible.
The external funding made this something
that we could kind of do without having to go through all
of the normal channels.
And they've also given us a ton of advice
on how to run and assess things and get data.
So that is that.