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 – Develop a system for organizing multidisciplinary programs and projects.
o Create a central system for listing and sharing prototyping resources among students
- Embed a linked page with all available resources and information.
- For each resource, verify available timeslots and set up a table to prevent conflicts.
- On deployment, should integrate into University of Miami Canelink System to integrate student accounts.
o Reach out to departments for software access and fabrication tools.
- Our primary targets should be the College of Arts and Sciences, and the College of Engineering
- Encouraging campus-wide integration would require a meeting and partnership starting with orientation.
- Stakeholder meeting would be used to include and offer benefits to faculty.
o Fundraise or allocate funds towards supplementing resource deficits and generating growth.
- Ideally, third-party donations should not create a conflicts of interest.
- Investment from outside the University will primarily advance stakeholder goals (good business climate).
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