Westridge School’s STEAMWork Design Studio

Westridge School’s STEAMWork Design Studio opened in 2015 as Westridge’s dedicated makerspace, offering students in all grades opportunities for hands-on, interdisciplinary work creating, inventing, and engineering. The STEAMWork philosophy is to empower students to discover how their world is put together, inspire curiosity, and develop a “design thinking” mindset. The makerspace equipment is used by classes in all departments and across divisions for a wide variety of projects, ranging from scanning and replicating fossilized woolly mammoth teeth in Biology, to designing traditional cut-paper patterns for a Spanish class Day of the Dead celebration, to engineering flotation devices in the seventh grade and 3D-printing student-designed music notation devices in orchestra class.

STEAMWork in the Classroom
One of our major goals for our makerspace is to make learning hands-on and visible. While our rocketry and robotics programs (and STEAM-based electives like the middle school STEAM Projects class) are frequent users of the space, our STEAMWork staff works with a range of students and faculty to provide interdisciplinary opportunities for engineering both within the daily curriculum and for students pursuing their STEAM curiosity and interests in their free time.

Makerspace Tools
Westridge School is proud to provide state-of-the-art equipment in the studio, including: 3D printers and scanners, a digital vinyl cutter, an Epilog Laser Cutter, a CNC machine, circuit-making and robotics tools, and a wide range of hand and wood-working tools.

Faculty in Residence
While any faculty member from any discipline is welcome to use the space, each year the studio hosts a STEAMWork Faculty Residency; interested faculty members are selected to receive training and guidance on how to integrate the STEAMWork Studio into their curriculum. Previous residents have included Lower School Spanish Teacher Sabrina Leon, Lower School Math & Science Teacher Susi Pettersson, Middle School Science Teacher Barbra Chabot, and Upper School English Teacher Tarra Stevenson.

For more information, visit https://www.westridge.org/academics/technology-design-innovation.

Westridge School, 324 Madeline Drive, Pasadena, (626) 799-1053 ext. 200 or visit www.westridge.org.