Innovation in bloom at the Fimbel Spring Showcase

On Wednesday, May 6, 2026, the Fimbel Maker & Innovation Lab at Mount Holyoke College transformed into a bustling open house for its annual Spring Showcase. The lively event brought together students, faculty and staff to celebrate a wide range of cross-disciplinary creativity across campus. The showcase highlighted how the Fimbel Lab serves as a collaborative space where students turn ideas into tangible projects.

Walking through the showcase, visitors were immediately drawn to the ambient glow of the “exceptional lanterns.” Created under the guidance of lab instructor and alum Sage Manhannah ’21, these interactive lanterns were designed to give students practical experience with laser cutting and microcontroller programming. The project challenged makers to engage with two intertwining mathematical concepts: Voronoi diagrams and Delaunay triangulations. 

“The thing that makes them exceptional is that these are not true Voronoi diagrams,” Manhannah explained, noting that the intentional mathematical deviations forced students to creatively customize their lanterns rather than relying entirely on online design generators.

Further into the lab, computer science major Sadichchha Maharjan ’26 and double major in French and computer science Adwoa Owusu ’26 demonstrated “Marcus,” a friendly personal assistant robot born in a physical computing class. Inspired by the ultimate college dilemma — wanting an item from a desk or a smoothie from the mini-fridge without getting out of bed — the duo engineered a remote-controlled robot equipped with a functional arm and gripper. Building Marcus pushed the students far outside their comfort zones, leading them to the lab’s 3D printing stations, wood workshop and soldering benches. 

“It’s really given me the chance to drive a project from start to finish,” said Owusu, reflecting on the autonomy the lab provided.

Katherine Aidala, director of the Fimbel Maker & Innovation Lab and Kennedy-Schelkunoff Professor of Physics, said that the Spring Showcase emphasized how embedded the lab has become at the College.

“Every year, we feel like we’re growing with more use, more student projects, more faculty engaging through their classes, and we see incredibly creative energy and capabilities from our students,” she said. “So, this year has been a really great chance for us to bring together a larger number of projects, rather than one class doing a presentation.”

Aidala discussed the wide array of projects being shown from a broad range of classes. 

“Beyond the computer science courses, we have student projects from classes in art history, biology, art studio, anthropology and even an Italian language class that designed marionettes and created videos,” she said. “We have independent projects from students majoring in architecture, computer science, environmental studies and chemistry. One grew out of a project in my electronics class in physics — she created a bookmark that automatically detects when you open a book and logs in all the statistics of how much you’ve read that you can track on a website.” 

Automation met botany in another corner of the room, where Tessa Brown ’26, an environmental studies and art studio double major, and Elizabeth Coon ’28, a music and computer science double major, showcased their creation: an automated plant-watering device. Designed for distracted plant owners, the system monitors soil moisture and plays a subtle buzzer rendition of “It’s Raining, It’s Pouring” whenever it pumps water. The device even features a sensor that switches an indicator light from green to red when the water reservoir is empty, automatically stopping the pump before it can run dry.

“Anytime you do a hands-on project, you learn so much because whatever you have in your mind of what you want to do, it almost never comes out exactly right,” said Aidala. “[There are] always pivots along the way. It’s so satisfying to turn your idea into this tangible reality.”