What is a software makerspace and how can we use it in education?
Format: Makerspace - demonstration - discussion
Stage of the project: Mid stage
Room: D33
Time: 12:00 - 16:15
Background and purpose
A makerspace or a Co-creation space, today is focused on turning ideas into physical prototypes by providing resources in terms of tools and infrastructure. In a university, a makerspace provides students with an opportunity to build a portfolio. Students experiment through an entire development life cycle by creating prototypes for each stage of a cycle. In a survey of engineering studies done in [6] 80% of the respondents replied that “Makerspace enabled them to be more confident to translate engineering concepts to non-engineers”. There are other papers [5] and [4] that also emphasise the pedagogical importance of a makerspace facilitating problem-based learning.
To the best of our knowledge, software development is yet to be included in the makerspace concept. We present our initial approach to extend the concept of a makerspace to software development using a private cloud. Thus, creating a future learning enviorment, and would like during the round table to get feedback and new input of what software makerspace is or should be used in education.
Finished work/ongoing work
While there are many commercial public could services, we have observed the following challenges with their use in an academic setting:
- Cost; a wrongly built system on a commercial cloud can cost a fortune, ML will always cost a lot. There is also another problem connected to cost connected with the academic funding system works with a different cycle not suited to a subscription model.
- Pedagogic; building our own system will let students learn how to build and maintain a cloud. This includes multiple know-how, from IP address configuration to handling complex or non-standards hardware. Understanding end-to-end life cycle of an application.
- Sustainability; the student-maintained cloud has partially been built by reusing old hardware and once there it also provides the possibility to share the available hardware.
Hence the need for a private cloud, during the student project [7] carried out by Emil and Pierre, Apache CloudStack was identified to be the most promising cloud implementation. Included below are a figure picturing the current hardware (on the left), current apps running in the cloud (on the top right) and the computer power available on the cloud (on the bottom right).
![A computer with a dashboard overivew to the right of it](/polopoly_fs/1.1226086.1675394839!/image/34_pic.png)
Results/observations/lessons learned
The project carried out by the students has realised a student-maintained cloud for rapid software prototyping following industry standards.
The cloud currently is used to offer the following services:
- Students of the software engineering course have to develop prototypes of simple micro-services which are currently being deployed in the cloud. Each student can get access to their own cloud account without any resource or time limitations.
- The cloud was also used to demonstrate research projects by students who implemented a HAPI FHIR (Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources) [1] based on serveras part of a course on medical engineering.
- There are two instances of Jupyter [2] running with access to GPU based VMs.
- Finally, the cloud now also hosts an instance of the Taiga [3] an open-source agile project management tool to train students in agile software engineering practices.
Take-home message
It time to let your student or reacher built there own private cloud.
References
- Hapi fhir - the open source fhir api for java. URL https://hapifhir.io/.
- The littlest jupyterhub — the littlest jupyterhub v0.1 documentation. URL https://tljh.jupyter.org/en/latest/.
- Taiga: Your opensource agile project management software. URL https://www.taiga.io/.
- From making gadgets to making talents: exploring a university mak- erspace. Education + Training, 62(2):145–158, 2020.
- . P. M. C. . L. B. . N. R. L. . L. J. S. . T. K. G. . F. C. R. . N. W. C. Barrett,
T. W. A review of university maker spaces paper presented at 2015 asee annual conference exposition, seattle, washington. 2015. doi: 10.18260/p.23442.
- F. . A. H. . L. C. Galaleldin, Mohamed Bouchard. The impact of mak- erspaces on engineering education. Proceedings of the Canadian Engi- neering Education Association, 2017. doi: 10.24908/pceea.v0i0.648.
- P. Le Fevre and E. Karlsson. Designing and implementing a private cloud for student and faculty software projects, 2022.