As case counts shot up, classes shut down and NJIT students scrambled to get home safely in March 2020, the engineers at the NJIT Makerspace began to plan.
“In mid-March, when it was pretty clear that this was going to be a huge challenge to the healthcare system, we asked ourselves what we could do,” said NCE Dean Moshe Kam in an interview with the NJIT Alumni Association. “When we closed NJIT and moved it all to remote access, we decided that we would keep the Makerspace open.”
The Makerspace is a collaborative prototyping and manufacturing facility, one of the largest of its kind on the East Coast. Students looking to turn their ideas into reality can find everything from 10-foot waterjet cutters to high-quality Ultimaker 3D-printers. In the midst of a PPE shortage, with doctors and nurses wearing week-old masks or even garbage bags for protection, the…