Parth Mehta, a fourth-year student majoring in aerospace engineering, and Luke Sharp (CWR ’26) were awarded top honors at the International Symposium on Academic Makerspaces (ISAM) hosted by the Higher Education Makerspace Initiative (HEMI), for their paper and presentation titled "ATLASS: [A Tool for] Quantifying Skill Development for Student Technicians in Academic Makerspaces."
Developed at Sears think[box], ATLASS is a system designed to help student employees track their skill development while giving makerspace leadership a clearer picture of capabilities and skill gaps across the team. By identifying those gaps, staff can proactively plan training and maintain institutional knowledge through student turnover, including graduation.
Despite this being their first academic conference, Mehta and Sharp’s presentation earned two rounds of applause from the audience, sparked enthusiastic interest from fellow makerspace practitioners eager to adopt the tool into their own workflows and ultimately won the conference's coveted Best Student Paper Award.
