Fridays Are Fab at Texas Inventionworks

The first thing you see walking into Texas Inventionworks on a Friday afternoon is a sea of orange lanyard-clad students filling the room with conversations and laughter. The sounds of community.

The room is unpredictable. On one side, a musician warms up his guitar. And throughout the building, students chat as they tinker with their projects. On the ground floor, students work at banks of 3D printers and laser cutting machines, and among them is Paulina Mroue.

Mroue is not an engineer. She’s a third-year arts and entertainment technology major who aspires to work in animation as a game or show animator. Or maybe a storyboard artist. She is one of the dozens of students, from all disciplines, who descended on Texas Inventionworks for Fab Friday.

“As a non-engineering student, I think that the community of TIW is very welcoming and encourages curiosity because everyone is very happy to help,” said Mroue.

Fab Fridays took place every Friday throughout the fall semester and will return in the spring. These weekly design parties aim to help students of all disciplines up their design game by doing design.  

Past Fab Fridays included robot-fighting competitions, make-it-take-it projects and much more, and they’re open to all students from any major at UT Austin. The star of this Friday event Darden Smith, a former UT songwriter-in-residence and founder of Longhorn Songscape. He and the students worked together to compose a song. 

Every student helped along the way—from the lyrics to the melody. Eventually, the room filled with music as Smith and the students sang their new song, “Build the World a Dream.”

A constant at these events is TIW Director Scott Evans. On this day, he kicks off the event by introducing himself to the students and shares the purpose of TIW: to move students towards solving real problems.

“We can help everyone who is here at TIW become more of a badass,” Evans said.

TIW is a hub of design and emerging invetions. It’s also a community where members build skills and relationships. This community was created by students, for students, anchored by the 65 members of the Texas Inventionworks student staff.

One prominent TIW staffer, Adarsh Pulasseri, a fourth-year aerospace engineering major who is building a liquid propellant rocket, has been on staff for three years. He assists with training on equipment and also serves as a sounding board for ideas and prototypes.

“I also just love helping people,” said Pulasseri.

Besides helping fellow students, Pulasseri and a group of TIW colleagues are setting up an intro to CAD (computer-aided design) workshop for students. Their goal is to build a foundation for learning this technology and pass it down to future students.

The students from across the Forty Acres who show up to Fab Fridays, the staff who help them learn the machines and all the special guests taking part in the events all play a key role in TIW’s mission. The organization, which started more than a decade ago in a single converted storage room, has now grown to become a campus-wide innovation ecosystem. And they’re only just getting started.