As Lone Star College student Johnathen Filar sits in front of his computer screen, surveying the progress of his class assignment coming to life, two 3-D printers are hard at work behind him.

The machines are constructing a plastic carrying case for his collection of die-cast cars, while he chats with a group of classmates sitting around him.

“It’s a class project where you just have to design something,” said Filar, a second-year mechanical engineering student. “It doesn’t matter what it is. It just has to have a certain number of parts.”

Filar is spending his afternoon in Lone Star College’s Learning Innovation Lab, a beloved resource tucked inside the Energy and Manufacturing Institute building that’s open to all students, staff and community members outside of the college.

The lab has over a dozen 3-D printers, vinyl cutters, 3-D carving machines, large-scale printers, programmable robots, a gaming lounge, a photography studio with video editing tools, and VR headsets, among other things — all free to use.

It also has a loyal following of staff and students who regularly spend their free hours in the lab. It’s where they can hang out, be themselves, and build just about anything. 

“To play with this stuff, people perceive there’s a barrier to entry,” said Christopher Schaefer, an engineering professor who helps oversee the lab. “Both intellectually, the equipment, the whole nine. No. Anybody can just come out here and literally play.”

The lab opened roughly seven years ago in a different building on campus, as a way for students to get more hands-on and creative with their work. The lab has grown over the years as new technology and tools are added.

But the lab’s regulars are eager for more visitors. Visitor data shows the lab isn’t as popular with those outside the college, despite being free. During the 2023-24 school year, the lab had just 42 visits from outside community members, while it tallied over 500 visits from students and staff.

“We try to tell people every time they come in: Tell your friends, your family, let them know,” said Gavin Thornton, a lab equipment coordinator at the college who helps run the innovation lab.

‘When things break, it’s almost good’

An earthy scent of burning wood floods the air. Nobody is barbecuing, jokes lab coordinator Sterling Hughes – it’s just someone using the GlowForge Pro, a $6,000 machine that uses a beam of light to cut or engrave most materials. 

With it, Lone Star College librarian Megan Hopwood is carving her family name into a slab of wood that will eventually be part of her resin pressure pot. With a low hum, the machine takes about five minutes to complete the task before the smoke inside clears, revealing the cursive imprint.

“Sometimes, it overheats,” Hopwood says, satisfiedly observing the result. “But everybody that hangs out here, if you’re having a problem, they’ll try to help you out. If you’re like, ‘Oh no, this isn’t working the way I hoped.’ They’ll just be very positive, like, ‘Together, we’re all going to get the things to work.’ … I just love it.”

Though the room is full of luxurious tools with pricetags in the quadruple digits, when machines sputter or things break, it’s not the end of the world. 

“Being a makerspace, things do break down,” Schaefer said. “But when things break, it’s almost good, because everybody here is so interested in the stuff, it’s kind of like this opportunity to tear something apart, fix it. .. What we don’t teach is what real engineering or programming computer science is. It’s trial and it’s a lot of failure, but the failure is good.”

A treasured hangout

Gregory Au and Jalen Thomas peer over one of the lab’s 13 3-D printers, surveying its jerky, repetitive movements.

“We’re preparing to start making a lifesize Zelda sword,” said Au, who studies machining. “It will take weeks.”

But the timeline is no issue for the pair. They’ll be here most days until it’s complete anyways, because for a group of tight-knit regulars, the lab has come to double as a treasured social space. 

“The real value of this is the culture,” Schaefer said. “The magic happens when the students are hanging out with each other, and the friendships start to form. … It really is something. It’s a beautiful thing to just sit back and watch it kind of come together.” 

Students regularly take to the lab in between classes or in their free time. When they’re not building talking robots and 3-D printing elaborate designs, students are studying together, playing video games, or messing around with the lab’s virtual reality equipment. The lab is also home to the robotics club, a social organization for students interested in engineering and programming.

It’s also been a place where students mentor and assist each other in their school work, Thornton said. 

“If someone sees a student is working on a (class) project by themselves, they’ll be like, ‘Oh, I did that two years ago, this is how you do it,’” Thornton said. 

A space to collaborate

The lab is full of gadgets from projects past: A 3-D-printed guitar, programmed to play the classic Guitar Hero game. A pocket-sized robot that uses AI to interact with humans. An arcade machine, constructed and programmed with 6,000 games. 

And the lab’s most recent addition and prized possession: a jelly bean sorter, which uses a camera and AI to scan a pile of jelly beans and pick up the flavor that someone instructs it to locate. 

The project was built completely from scratch, which included students fashioning its power source from an old computer. Roughly ten students and lab coordinators dropped into the lab during their free hours to help construct it. On some nights, students and staff stayed until 11 p.m. tinkering. In the end, it took about three months to complete. 

“I’ve never been so proud,” Schaefer said. “It was messy but in a beautiful way. .. We broke things, and the students got to see their professors breaking things and going. And then the students would solve problems that the professors didn’t know the answers to. And it was really this — not just collaborative — but it was real.”

The Learning Innovation Lab is located at 11521 Compaq Center W Drive, Houston, Texas 77070 in Room 110. It is open Monday through Thursday from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m.

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