Priorities:University of Miami Student Priorities

Our overview video link

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zkNxMLteg8g

Strategy #1 – Give Students greater ability to work on their projects, make prototypes, and get experience in I&E

o   Enable students to do the projects they want to do

§  Give Students resources, and potentially funding to create real prototypes

§  Give projects that are somewhat more underway funding (in conjunction with/as an alternative to LaunchPad)

o  Create an Adafruit style business plan

§  Website that allows people to upload their project designs open source and make profit with customers supporting creators

§  UM sponsored Adafruit projects

o   Partner with the medical campus design organization, Innovaid

§  Medical students with ideas that address drawbacks in medicine give these ideas to us, and we form design teams to work on them

§  This will be a full collaboration with us, providing UM undergrads with ideas that our club will sponsor to make a reality

 

Strategy #2 - Bring together different departments and schools to share resources in a centralized / several decentralized Maker Space(s)

-          Improve management of existing machinery and facilities, and have them more accesible for all students

-          Create a shared space for students of all disciplines, so that the department boundaries aren’t as prevalent

-          Full-fledged student-run Maker Space

o   Student Autonomy

o   UPrint style management of 3-D printers, which allow students to print a CAD file from anywhere with internet, and pick it up at their convenience

o   Chemistry/biology equipment available to any students who have interesting ideas for research in a science field with high barrier to entry

o   Enables innovation and aids in the realization of all aspects of this organization

o   There is potential pushback from Johnson & Johnson Maker Space

§  Students don’t have autonomy

§  Engineers that are unaffiliated with UM (UM is giving them free office/lab space)

§  May become like existing UM machine shop, science labs in that it isn’t accessible to students

o   Because of the above point, we may make a new Maker Space separate from the College of Engineering, so that we can avoid these pitfalls.

 

Strategy #3 – Have a D-School style curriculum and/or Design-Thinking Workshops

o   Build confidence/creativity skills through practice and demonstrations

o  Give practical know-how in design and prototyping

o   Make design teams to work on already made projects

o   Have speakers from local industry come and talk about their experience and do Q&As

Strategy #4 – Partner with Miami area companies for project sponsorship

o   Angel investors give seed funds to their favorite projects, perhaps even have competitions for the purposes of deciding who gets funding

o   Shark-Tank style pitch session to get seed funding from businesses or investment groups