Workshops at the Wond’ry
Ambassador Spotlight
Last Thursday in the Makerspace, I had the pleasure of designing and teaching a workshop about engineering flexible electrical circuits to 20 Vanderbilt employees from the Office of Alumni Relations. At the beginning of the workshop, I asked everyone to raise a hand if he or she had experience working with circuits of any kind. There was not a single hand that went up. The primary purpose of the workshop was to create a stoplight out of LEDs, paper, and conductive tape. The stoplight was controlled by a piece of paper that you can slide up or down depending on which light you want to activate. As the workshop went on, people became more and more competitive about being the first to finish rather than giving up in the face of a challenge. At the end of the workshop, every participant successfully created a working circuit and was talking about how much they had enjoyed the workshop. To me, this experience embodies the opportunity available at the Wond’ry: I, who am not a teacher, taught a group of adults, who are not engineers, how to build a circuit and we all left the workshop having succeeded at something completely new.
Jay Cavenaugh
Student Ambassador