EDUCATION: Blake Marggraff | Co-Founder, Betaversity

Say you have a school and you want to encourage students to learn to design and build really cool stuff—except you think it’s hard or expensive or intimidating. Not so, says Blake Marggraff: With the right tools, someone can get started within five minutes. To prove it, the Wash U student co-founded Betaversity with a group of peers. It’s the simple idea of taking a shipping container and filling it with tech materials, basic supplies, hardware and software to create a "makerspace” where anyone can invent, design and build. The BetaBox is “designed with the totally naïve user in mind,” Marggraff says. Some of the gear, like the laser cutter and 3-D printer, has a learning curve; other supplies, like duct tape and pipe cleaners, couldn’t be simpler. Users from all academic disciplines have left with physical items ranging from device prototypes to sound/music visualization art projects. Once the students have learned by doing, the next step is getting a job. BetaVersity can help with that too, through Atlas, its process-oriented online portfolio for engineers.