Foundations of Fabrication: an introductory class

Foundations of Fabrication is a 40 week course to introduce adult students to digital fabrication, within a fully equipped non-profit community Fab Lab. Designed to fit into full-time lives and around full-time work, the course offers a chance to learn a broad spectrum of fabrication skills. Each week had a lesson, office hours, and assignments intended to take less than 10 hours of time. As this was the first year running Foundations of Fabrication, many things were learned about running a long-form introductory course. We will discuss the context, content overview, strategies for implementation, students’ perspective, and lessons learned from running such a course. Because of successes and further interest, MakeHaven will be running the course again: implementing lessons learned and hoping to continuously improve the Foundations of Fabrication course in future years. Learn about the resources we’ve made publicly available.