Maker Hub Club is proud to announce that our individual membership application is now live! High school and middle school students in the U.S. are eligible. Learn more and apply here.
Since the founding of Maker Hub Club, we have offered a high school chapter program where students start a club at their school and receive resources/funding to support their members.
Last year, students in our chapter program held a handful of successful events and membership was gaining momentum, but as the year wrapped up and the COVID-19 pandemic worsened, all the remaining events came to a halt.
Diamond Bar High School chapter President Cathleen Chen describes, “Our club was planning on hosting a workshop and our maker fair after Spring Break but then our school decided to go on shut down. The student officers and I had already started planning everything out, what we were going to do and how we were going to host our maker fair and even selection of next years’ officers. But because of the virus we had to put everything on hold. It was stressful.”
Devastated to see event plans across all chapters go down the drain and the community missing out on the opportunity to attend the widely anticipated school-wide maker fairs, we contemplated deeply on how our 2020-2021 programs offering would adapt to COVID-19.
With COVID-19 preventing in-person group settings, we acknowledged that student makers could no longer meet in-person and would have difficulty accessing maker resources. To address this obstacle, we ideated a new individual membership program that enables student makers from all across the U.S. to collaborate remotely, receive funding for maker projects done at home, and participate in virtual maker events.
Not only does our individual membership program address safety amidst this pandemic, but it also features additional opportunities. For one, we now serve middle school students (a population we were eager to serve in our chapter program but couldn’t due to the absence of student-led club culture in most middle schools). Through our 2020-2021 individual membership program, student makers will:
Receive funding for individual projects.
Instructor Awards | Write an Instructable and receive a reimbursement for material expenses.
Participate in organization-wide events.
Maker's meetings, guest speakers, maker contests
Workshop series | 3D printing, Arduino programming, Hydroponic growing
Hear about maker events outside of school.
Virtual maker fairs, such as the Miami Maker Faire
Contests, workshops, and more!
Join our student makers slack and network with student makers across the U.S.
Collaborate with others through the project-help-and-collabs channel
Showcase projects in the project-gallery channel
Within the first hour of launch, our individual membership program received 32 applications. As I write this blog and more applications flow in, this year’s cohort of student makers will no doubt become our largest and most diverse yet:
With greater numbers and exceptional diversity, we are afforded more opportunities in collaboration, innovation, and interdisciplinary learning, making 2020-2021 an exciting year. Most of all, we pride ourselves in supporting an ever-growing community of student makers who are eager to learn, make, and showcase alongside one another. As noted by a student who recently joined our individual membership program:
"What I look forward to in joining Maker Hub Club is being in a community that appreciates and celebrates innovation. At my school, there is not a club that does this exactly, and sometimes I feel embarrassed to share my ideas because there's no outlet to show them. But now I'm looking forward to meeting people like me who can uplift each other and inspire each other to create, as well as gaining access to resources/funding that will help me create more projects." - Grace H. (Maker Hub Club member)