On February 4, the AT&T Learning Studio won the 2016 EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative’s New Media Consortium Horizon Report Video Competition.
The other top place winners of the contest were the University of Arizona and Minnesota State University.
The winning video highlighted a project that occupational therapy students Kati Saylor, Molly Wright and Justin Atkinson built in the Maker Lab.
The project the students designed, was a foot roller made with a 3D printer. The roller was designed to help ease the pain of Plantar Fasciitis, a painful condition caused by inflammation of tissue in the foot. Saylor said she and her partners did not begin their project knowing they would be in the video, but the process of sitting down and having their story told was enlightening.
“It was actually a really cool experience, simply because everything was so professional,” Saylor said. “As a student, I had utilized different aspects of the Learning Studio before, but up until Nil led us back into the recording studio, I had absolutely no idea that kind of set up existed right here on our own campus.”
Nil Santana, director of the Maker Lab, explained the task the students were given as part of the intro to making class, which is taught in the Maker Lab.
“In that class, students were asked to develop a few projects and were presented a methodology for problem solving,” Santana said.
The students had to come up with a project that fell under one of three categories. The project had to be either a new invention, an invention that had never been done before or an invention that was an improvement on an already existing product.
The Maker Lab and the occupational therapy students’ project was a perfect subject for the video competition, Learning Studio director Kyle Dickson said.
“Every year the New Media Consortium produces the Horizon Report that forecasts six important technologies to watch in higher education,” Dickson said. ” Since Maker spaces were on that list this year, it seemed like a perfect fit for telling the story about the things that are coming out of the Maker Lab.”
The winning video can be seen on the Learning Studio’s Vimeo page or by visiting blogs.acu.edu/makerlab/.
