Idealab “Make Fail Learn Repeat”
In 2013, our makerspace was created when a group of students interested in robotics and programming turned one of the rooms in the school into The IdeaLab. ideaLab’s design changed from year to year and evolved into a unique learning environment in which students learn from each other. The ideaLab continues to inspire us all as an area where we discover ourselves, work together, make mistakes, try again, and learn.
The lab continues to grow and change every year as the interest and ideas of the students change to ensure that all students can make the projects they are passionate about. The ideaLab continues to evolve as a dynamic living and learning space, as illustrated by the diversifying additions of the Lab Fabrication.
IdeaLab consists of four parts: Electronics and programming room, mechanical workshop, fabrication room and Multimedia Lab. In the electronics and programming lab we’ve, 2 Mac Pros and a PC for high power application like 3D Modeling, Ai training and video editing, a soldering iron station, electronic tools for rapid prototyping, 3D printers and storage for most of the components we use in the lab. In the mechanical workshop, which is called the Bumper Lab, we build the mechanical parts for our projects and prototypes using various power and hand tools. In our fabrication room we have our CNC router and laser cutter. This room is in a separate building since we have a lot of young students coming into the lab. By placing the machines into a different room we aimed to prevent any injuries. The Multimedia Lab is the place where the students focused on entrepreneurship, graphic design and video production can work on their projects. There is a vinyl cutter which is used to make things like t-shirts and stickers from the designs the students create. Every room has an embedded smart TV system.
In IdeaLab, we are working on a number of interesting, garage-type STEAM projects, including arcade machines and games, drones, face and emotion recognition devices, sensors for IOT, and various RaspberryP iand Arduino projects. At the same time, we participate in many national and international projects, conferences and hackathons on a regular basis. Since 2014, we have been organizing Hisar Coding Summit, a 2-day event where we give various free programming and design workshops to anyone who is willing to learn. In 2019 and 2020, we brought the Pi Wars robotics Competition to Turkey. In addition to the 2 day long Competition, we also gave electronics, programming, and design courses on how to build a Pi Wars robot to the competing teams. With the positive feedback we received from over 300 participants from the events we organized, we decided to give a workshop at FabXLive 2020 about building a modular competition robot for beginners.
We have been working on an educational toy robot named Pomelo, which teaches the basics of programming and computational thinking to younger kids with physical code blocks. We participated in several conferences including FabLearn Asia’20 with our prototypes and got our paper published by the IEEE. Currently, we are working on patenting this project. We have been collaborating with a professor in Wesley University for a research project about the transition from block-based coding to syntax-based coding.
The safety of the students in the lab is crucial. Therefore, we host “Safety Workshops” every year for the new students. The safety posters around the lab always reminds the students how to use the tools and machines correctly.
Students that work in the IdeaLab learn to take responsibility for their own learning and obtain skills like programming, 3D Design and critical thinking as they work according to our motto “Make, Fail, Learn and Repeat”.
