$100,000 grant will help MakeICT advance its mission

The first thing founders of the tech and teaching group MakeICT did a couple of years ago was spend their own pocket money to teach art, tech and innovation.

The Knight Foundation just gave them a grant of $100,000.

They plan to spend that money to teach art, tech and innovation.

“Our mission is pretty clear to us,” said Dominic Canare, the Wichita State University student and instructor who leads MakeICT as president. “Everyone in the group has a clear idea of what they want MakeICT to be already, so this grant will help us just travel further.”

They are looking for a new work space larger than their digs on Douglas Avenue in the Delano neighborhood. They will likely buy more high-performance tools, Canare said.

What they are is a loosely organized group of innovators in art, tech, computers and education.

What they do is teach and give ideas away to hobbyists, WSU engineering students and artists. “We are not just a few people with nothing better to do on Monday nights,” Canare said.

They teach people how to make and run 3D printers, for example. How to make or innovate circuit boards. How to make large model airplanes that fly.

Their reach goes beyond tech or engineering, and several are multi-talented. Canare is a computer programmer working on a Ph.D in the psychology department; he is also an instructor of engineering 101, and introduction to Engineering. One founder, John Harrison, not only was a longtime lab instructor at WSU’s College of Engineering, but also is the lead violinist for the Wichita Symphony. Tom McGuire, who teaches engineering skills at WSU labs that Harrison created, also is an artist and sculptor.

The group formed a few years ago, bent on helping people. Though creative and inventive, Canare said, none were all that interested in inventing businesses or making profits.

But they watched with interest after WSU president John Bardo this year began saying he wanted to find millions of dollars, build an innovation campus, and create maker space for local inventors, innovators, creative people.

Bardo’s interests center more on using the university’s researchers and scientists to help the local economy, creating new businesses and jobs. MakeICT’s interests are more about spreading ideas. But the group has talked with WSU, briefly with Bardo, and more at length with Lou Heldman, now vice president of strategic communications for WSU and former interim director of WSU’s Center for Entrepreneurship.

And the university and the group will keep talking.

WSU still has a long road in creating it’s own plans. Demolition has begun on the old Wheatshocker Hall, where a new innovation building will be built.

“We know MakeICT is a great collection of talented people, and we hope they’ll find things in our maker space of enough interest to them that they will utilize it,” Heldman said. “The people in MakeICT are in many cases WSU students, faculty or staff or alumni, and we expect to use their talents to help shape this.”

The group could go only so far on their own pocket money, Canare said.

The new grant, he said, “will help us take MakeICT where it needs to be, and it acknowledges that we are a community resouerce.”

This story was originally published November 26, 2014 at 5:48 PM with the headline "$100,000 grant will help MakeICT advance its mission."