The Creative Engineering Fabrication Lab (CrEF Lab) at Crefeld is the school’s makerspace, and one aspect of a robust maker-ed and experiential-learning-based program. CrEF Lab is a culture-first makerspace, committed to expression of all voices and engagement of all students, and especially those of young women and young people of color whose perspectives are often underrepresented in STEM fields and maker spaces. The lab space features a fleet of four 3D printers, a set of six full, permanent soldering stations, vinyl cutter, wall of electronic components, microcontrollers, various raspberry pi and other boards, green screen, class sets of iPads and Macbook Airs loaded with design and coding software (including Swift Playgrounds, DoInk, AudioWorks, AR/VR options & other apps for iOS; and Blender, Fusion360, Unity, PICO8/ Voxatron, Arduino, Inkscape, IDE– integrated development environment– options, and many others for laptops) Mindstorms, Moog Werkstatt modular synthesizer, and PUSH 2 for music production with Ableton Live, also loaded onto each laptop.

Maker education at The Crefeld School includes an extensive set of options across the arts, sciences, computer science, and other fields, and is ever expanding. Aspect of the program encompassed by the CrEF Lab, in particular, include:

  • Three maker ed courses per semester taught out of the makerspace. A sampling based on recent offerings: 

    • Art & History of (Analog) Games, which includes game design & construction 

    • Structured Projects

    • Making, Coding & Physical Computing for anyone who identifies as female or was raised as female

  • A series of co-curricular workshops offering students experience and exposure without the commitment of a full semester course. A sampling based on recent offerings:

    • Soldering, open to anyone who identifies as female or was raised as female

    • Video Game Design Workshop for Students of Color

  • STEAM Integration and collaborations across departments to both more deeply integrate the arts with relevant technologies and new media, and to bring maker education into academic subject areas

  • Service Learning Internship for which students serve as lab interns, contributing authentically and substantially to the operation of the lab

  • Open Lunch sessions for informal, optional creative work time 

  • A newly-forming chapter of Beats-by-Girlz;  Beats-by-Girlz is an organization that offers programming to young women interested in learning music production

  • An annual full-school hour-of-code event

Spring Mini Course offerings; this year’s is a Video Game Design course using the game engine Unity. (More about Crefeld’s Mini Course Program can be found here.) A previous year’s offering workshopped the construction of handheld game consoles using Raspberry Pi computers.