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As part of the PI's outreach, a course-based undergraduate research experience engaged undergraduate women in research from examining the literature to identify a gap, formulating a research hypothesis, designing experiments to test the hypothesis, analyzing the data, writing and submitting an abstract and presenting the research to the scientific community. This project was as follows: Polyethylene glycol (PEG) has increasingly been used to reliably encapsulate cells within solid microspheres. Although hollow microcapsules have also been demonstrated, there remain challenges for their use. Microfluidics can reliably form empty hollow microcapsules, but tend to clog when cells are introduced. Emulsion methods have shown success with encapsulating cells within microcapsules; however the capsules tend to burst. Here, we compare an emulsion technique with our new dropwise method that combines extrusion with vibration of a device. Light exposure and photoinitiator concentration was varied to probe their effect on the microcapsules.