“This experience was really formative in actually creating the physical product,” said student Harshul Makwana, who competed in the makeathon with a team called SaniBottle, which is building a product prototype to sanitize water bottles within a matter of minutes using minimal energy and no water. “We were able to learn a lot about how to go from idea to actual prototype.”
The multi-faceted experience that Makwana describes is indicative of the type of engaged learning that leaders at the Entrepreneurship Center set out to create for students.
“Our primary goal for the Carolina Challenge Makeathon was to give students new ways to collaborate with other teammates from different majors to put their creative ideas for social impact solutions into action,” said Aspyn Fulcher, assistant director of the business school’s Entrepreneurship Center and director of the Carolina Challenge Makeathon. “By expanding the event from one week to two weeks this year, we saw student teams take advantage of an increasing number of entrepreneurial resources on campus and produce multiple iterations of the prototypes they built and tested to solve the problems that they care about.”