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Makerspaces, intended for open and collaborative learning, often struggle to attract a diverse group of users, particularly concerning gender diversity. These issues include makerspaces becoming associated primarily with white male students, gendered connotations of machines and materials, and women’s perceived lack of self-efficacy in using makerspace tools. As a result, women may view makerspaces as unwelcoming, and societal stereotypes can affect their engagement in these spaces. Efforts to create more inclusive makerspaces are essential to fully realize the potential of makerspaces, encourage and boost confidence in marginalized groups to pursue careers in different engineering areas, and promote a diverse and collaborative maker culture. Moreover, defining makerspaces is challenging due to conflicting perceptions, the uniqueness of spaces, and the abstract elements in these environments, revealing a gap between academic definitions and the diverse voices of people interested in utilizing makerspaces. Our goal is to see if there are differences in the fundamental academic makerspace definition and makerspace definition by different genders, providing insights into how inclusive our makerspace is. We focus on gender because our interviewees focused more on gender than other identity markers in our conversations, but we also report additional demographic data that likely impacted participants’ experiences, namely, their racial and ethnic identities. Our corpus is drawn from semi-structured interviews with students enrolled in an introductory first-year engineering course. Out of 28 students interviewed, 10 identified as women, 16 as men, one as both women and questioning or unsure, and one as women and nonbinary and transgender. In terms of racial/ethnic identifications, nine participants identified as White or Caucasian; six identified as Latinx or Hispanic; five identified as Latinx or Hispanic, White or Caucasian; three identified as Black or African American; two identified as Asian, Desi, or Asian American; one identified as Latinx or Hispanic, Native American or Alaska Native; one identified as Southwest Asian, Middle Eastern, or North African, White or Caucasian; and one identified as Native African. In this ongoing study, from interview transcripts, we extracted participant responses to questions regarding their definitions of and impressions of makerspaces to identify commonalities and differences. Specifically, we use natural language processing techniques to extract word frequency and centrality and synthesize commonalities into a shared definition of a makerspace. We also separated responses from participants by gender identities to evaluate how definitions varied with gender. These emergent definitions are compared with commonly accepted definitions derived from research papers. Additionally, we conduct a complementary discourse analysis of students’ definitions and impressions of makerspaces, qualitatively examining how diverse students characterize ways of being and doing in the makerspace.
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This content will become publicly available on July 11, 2026
Industry views on optimization in architectural and engineering practice: A CMM study
In architecture and engineering, design professionals may use the term “optimization” to describe a range of design approaches. These working definitions of optimization may not align with one another, or with the formal definition of mathematical optimization in engineering education. This paper presents a thematic analysis of 13 interviews with design professionals who use optimization in their work. Using the communication theory of coordinated management of meaning (CMM) to understand how the interviewer and interviewee were negotiating possible definitions, four themes are identified: optimization as performance improvement, as achieving varied goals, as a systematic process, and as a formal problem structure with variables and objectives, which is most aligned with the mathematical definition. Interviewees used these varied definitions dynamically in conversation, which informs researchers and educators about their potential use in practice.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2033332
- PAR ID:
- 10625415
- Publisher / Repository:
- CRC Press
- Date Published:
- ISBN:
- 9781003658641
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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