Gillespie’s Science Café: Touring a Makerspace

MakersFaireOn Thursday, April 10, 7-8:30 p.m., visitors to the Gillespie Museum’s Science Café will have an opportunity to tour Stetson’s Innovation House, its near neighbor. The Innovation House provides tools to develop and make tangible objects and is the gathering place for a community of makers of all kinds, tinkerers, inventors, innovators and fabricators. The workshop is equipped with two 3D printers, a computer-controlled router, a vacuum-forming machine, table saw, drill press, various cordless power tools, soldering tools, and many castoff robots.

Computer science majors Kyle Campbell and Christian Micklisch, pictured left, developed the RapiBaBot at the Innovation House for Professor Hala ElAarag’s operating systems class.

Bill Ball, Ph.D., visiting professor of political science at Stetson University, will lead the tour and speak informally about the space and some of the projects underway.

“Innovation House is a loose collection of like-minded people,” explains Ball, who has a lifelong interest in tools and fabrication and has gotten the workshop up and running. He hopes Innovation House will make users “comfortable, creating cross-disciplinary teams using contemporary technology to bring their ideas for innovation projects into reality.”

This event, free and open to the public, is one of a series of science café events this spring which focus on sustainability. The final Science Café  this semester will be an Earth Day discussion–How Do We Meet Global Demands for Water?–on Tuesday, April 22, led by Harry Price, Ph.D., associate professor of  chemistry at Stetson.

For more information, as well as other museum events, call the Gillespie Museum at 386.822.7330 or visit www2.stetson.edu/gillespie .  Cultural credit is available to Stetson undergraduates who attend.