How a Fab Lab Can Drive Ordinary People to Become Engineering Enthusiasts and Help to Make a Better Society
A Fab Lab (fabrication laboratory) is such an amazing place to make (almost) anything as the Fab Lab creator, Mr Neil Gershenfeld from MIT uses to say. Many machines, tools and special spaces provides a creative and collaborative environment where student
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Abstract A Fab Lab (fabrication laboratory) is such an amazing place to make (almost) anything as the Fab Lab creator, Mr Neil Gershenfeld from MIT uses to say. Many machines, tools and special spaces provides a creative and collaborative environment where students, teachers, inventors and enthusiasts can interact. There are virtually no limits boundaries because, above all, a Fab Lab is an open space for children, youth and adults. Fab LAB Facens is inside a small-forty-years-old and private college which main purpose lies on how engineering students can learn through real hands-on experimentation. This experience are based on a new hybrid methodology we call Deliverable-Based Learning (DBL) where students are lead to think on what they want to deliver as a result of their learning process and then they start a reverse build process till understand how each micro fragment (things, thoughts, process and people) interact to achieve the deliverable. Preliminary results shows that DBL by means of Fab LAB Facens can drive ordinary people to become engineering enthusiasts and help to make a better society. Keywords Fab Lab Society Prototyping
High level education Creation CNC machine
Deliverable-Based learning
1 Introduction The Sorocaba Engineering School (FACENS) is the first higher education institution of the sector founded in Sorocaba, São Paulo, Brazil. Maintained by the Sorocaba Cultural Association for Technological Renovation (ACRTS), it is considered to be a nonprofit and philanthropic Federal Organization certified by the National Welfare Council. Subsequently, it offers numerous grants to students who have socio-economic needs. The organization also invests all of its profits in the College, making FACENS an educational center that is growing constantly. During A.D. Pila (&) Sorocaba Engineering College (FACENS), Sorocaba, São Paulo, Brazil e-mail: [email protected] © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2017 T.Z. Ahram and W. Karwowski (eds.), Advances in The Human Side of Service Engineering, Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing 494, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-41947-3_33
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the past forty years Facens has been offered eight engineering courses in the field of Chemistry, Electric, Mechanics, Automation, Building, Computing, Games and Production. Facens is known as the best private engineering college in the region. Part of this success is its employability score over than 96 % when considering its former students. In the year 2014 we decided to submit a new idea to the Global Entrepreneurship Lab (G-Lab) from MIT Sloan School of Management. The main idea was how we could use our campus as a living laboratory to prototype solutions for smart cities. That is the Smart Campus Facens project. We were selected and the virtual meetings with MIT students took three months. In January 2015 we received at Facens four students from MIT to cooperate with our staff and one of the delivered projects was a Fab Lab. For us a Fab Lab were a totally new idea because it (some
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