Spring 2025 Semester Recap

As the semester wraps up, we want to take the time to reflect on all of our activities, events, and achievements throughout these past 5 months. Without our wonderful and talented team, we wouldn't have been able to accomplish all of our goals.

Milestones

This semester we welcomed 993 students into our Willis space, 370 students at our Discovery Park location, and 152 students into Frisco Landing. Another busy semester in the books! We also changed to a new system called 3D Printer OS for patrons to slice, start, and monitor their 3D prints. All 3 of our laser cutters were up and running. We had installed new projectors at our Willis and Discovery Park locations to help us advertise our events more. We hosted our first open house at Discovery Park in our new location - room B135. We collaborated with the Comic Book Club. We hosted Tea and Tinkering events before the week of finals to provide a break for students. We also ordered more equipment to expand our collections, improve our space, and be ready for the Fall semester. More improvements to come!

Guestbook Loom

Starting in the beginning of the Spring semester, we set up a guestbook loom like the one that Quinn Dombrowski of Stanford University set up for their Makerspace. With our loom, we included a rainbow of yarn for patrons to ‘sign’ with, each colour symbolizing a reason to come into The Spark. In addition, we provided multi-coloured pony beads that would signify an emotion or feeling that the patron wanted to include.

Overall, 53 strands of yarn were woven into the loom over the course of the Spring semester. Of these 53, red, the colour signifying “First Visit” was the most popular yarn colour, with 13 newcomers signing into our space! Following closely with 10 strands were our wonderful student staff, signified by orange yarn. The remaining strands were divided mostly across Computer Lab use (yellow), 3D Printing (blue), and Workshops (black) with an honourable mention from Textiles (green).

On these 53 strands, patrons included over 240 beads! Tallying the numbers of beads and their corresponding emotions proved interesting, as patrons largely reported feeling sad (35 beads) and tired (33 beads) but also reported feeling excited (29 beads). We’re hoping as the weather warms up and the days get longer and brighter we will see our visitors perking up as well. We recommend joining The Spark for our weekly Crafting Corner programming (dates TBA) to help de-stress from the long semester with fun and relaxing crafts.

We will be returning our guestbook loom to the makerspace once the Summer semester starts, so keep an eye out for your chance to weave a mark!

Crafting Corner

A new initiative that we began in the Spring semester was a series of crafting programs. There would be two programs each week, one leading patrons through the process of making a new type of craft, and the other allowed patrons to unwind and bring their own projects to work on or use the various supplies we had on hand to learn a new skill. We titled these Crafting Corners. Over the semester, we held a number of guided crafts showing patrons how to make soap, carve, book bind, weave, cross stitch, and crochet. During our open crafting sessions, patrons came in to learn how to crochet, weave, paint, and embroider. Throughout the Spring semester, we logged 81 patrons attending our programs, thank you all for a great start!

 Workshop Competition - Winners

A competitive but friendly competition between our team emerged in the month of May. This competition was a way for our team to show off their skills, and help build each other up. Each maker came up with a workshop idea of any skill they were passionate and knowledgeable on teaching. A few topics included: how to make a recycled glass terrarium, 3D printing for cosplayers, Lucky Womp Modeling, Construct a Cub DIY Bear, Lucky Felt pins, Build with AI, Blender Chess Modeling, and a few more. Out of these workshops, we had 3 winners based on patron attendance.

In 3rd place, Construct a Cub by Abbi & Kara won with 5 attendees. In 2nd place, Blender Chess Modeling by Dax won with 17 attendees.

And in 1st place, Build with AI by Mythri, Nanda & Prashanth won with 48 attendees! Here are a few words from this team:
"Just finished hosting the “Build with AI” workshop series at The Spark, UNT - and it was equal parts Python, people, and pure problem-solving!
There’s something incredibly refreshing about going back to the basics and just building. We used Python (Flask), integrated APIs for LLM-powered responses, and watched as ideas turned into fully functioning projects.
But the real magic? It happened when everyone started customizing their agents. It started off like a workshop and turned into this collaborative, chaotic (the good kind), energizing community session where we brainstormed, coded, debugged (a lot), and GenAI-ed agents that were uniquely us.
Who knew debugging could be... fun?
(Okay, not fun fun — but the “I just fixed this and now I feel invincible” kind of fun.)
A huge thank you to the amazing team I got to work with during this series.
It was incredible to see people water people and build together." - Nanda
 
   

Looking Ahead
Thank you to everyone who has visited our makerspace! We have exciting things planned this summer and we can't wait to show you what's new in the Fall!