New Makerspace ignites In the lower level of Rogers House, Pickering College’s own Makerspace provides students the opportunity to design, build or fabricate almost anything they can imagine. Previously, the Makerspace was located at the back of the art room; however, this limited access to it while art was being taught, and it was smaller and less functional. When Dr. Lock became Head of School, she wanted to improve it. She identified another room in Rogers House and saw the potential to create a Makerspace there. “She saw beyond the furniture that was in here and thought that this would
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be a great space,” says Gordon Chiu, Manager, Information Technology. Now, the room is outfitted with a laser cutter, a CNC router, and two new 3D printers, as well as a supply of hand tools and power tools.
January 2023. One of the first projects Pickering College students took on in the Makerspace was the FarmBot, a CNC farming project that combines agriculture and technology, two areas that are important to Pickering College.
Chiu says it is “a space where you can actually build things out of whatever medium you choose, whether that be wood, aluminum, even working with circuitry and things like that.”
FarmBot has been integrated into the curriculum at more than 500 educational institutions around the world and provides hands-on, engaging STEM education on topics such as farming, nutrition, soil science, biology, coding, and more.
The space itself was intentionally designed to support this. All the chairs fold so they can be moved out of the way and the tables are height adjustable. Everything, including the machines, is on castors to make it very flexible. The first students to use the Makerspace were the FIRST Robotics Team, a co-curricular club that built its own robot in the space, beginning in
The elements of Pickering College’s FarmBot were constructed in the Makerspace in the spring. The Green Team cut and assembled the farm bed to the FarmBot’s specifications, then assembled the robot and began the initial stages of setup, which included connecting it to the internet and starting to tinker with it to make it run
