Room V at the Cubberley Community Center in Palo Alto is an inventor’s dream: Glossy 3D printers stand lined up along walls, spray paint bottles lie scattered on art tables and small trinkets sit on window sills. Eager students and adults watch their inventions come to life — almost like magic.
MakeX, a nonprofit, is an inventing space founded in 2014 by then-high school students James Wang, Jeremy Trilling and Nathan Kau, who attended Palo Alto High School. It’s currently run by a group of high school students from around the Bay Area.
On Fridays from 4 p.m. to 6 p.m. and Saturdays from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. — MakeX’s open hours — many visitors spend time working on their inventions, which range from fun projects to machine maintenance.
The space holds several tools accessible to anyone who comes in, including laser cutters, a wood cutting shop, an electronics lab, 2D and 3D printing machines, an art studio and CNC and vinyl cutters. Whatever tool you need, MakeX probably has it.
MakeX has gone a long way to become the functional space it is today.
“A while ago, it was just a bunch of students who were making a traveling workspace in their garage,” said Gunn High School junior and MakeX mentor David Kim. “It was just a bunch of students banded together who wanted to make a maker space.”
Eventually, MakeX got access to its room at the community center in December 2014 by becoming a nonprofit, according to Palo Alto High School sophomore Adam Fong.
Many MakeX visitors are young elementary school students. However, visitor ages vary, as some are middle school and others are retired Bay Area citizens.
“It’s diverse,” Kim said. “There have been Stanford graduate students. People [who are] high school students and then middle schoolers and elementary schoolers.”
For retired worker Creig Moore, MakeX gives him the space to make small creative works.
“I make logic puzzles … [for] entertainment,” Moore said. “I’ve been coming [to MakeX] twice a week for about a year.”
During the MakeX visiting hours, mentors often spend time helping visitors with their projects and maintaining safety guidelines.
“Our job is to maintain the space,” Fong said. “We also teach people how to use tools they don’t know how to use. Also, of course, safety … we are required to supervise all the time.”
Other mentors take the time to finely organize the MakeX inventing space to make it more efficient for visitors.
“We have a very small space,” said Living Wisdom High School senior and one of MakeX’s mentor leaders, Carter Baginskis. “It’s a little bit of seeing how people interact with the tools and seeing the result of that and saying … ‘How can I fit more tools in this space so more people can do more projects within these constraints?’”
For MakeX mentors, the ability to help people achieve their invention dreams, as well as their own, inspires them to continue volunteering at the MakeX space.
“We have the code to the lockbox,” Gunn High junior Nitzan Drori said. “We can technically be here whenever we want. So, we use everything and make anything.”
Watching visitors develop lightbulb moments, where they learn to use new technologies and develop new skills, has become a highlight of Baginskis’s time at MakeX.
“One of my favorite things is teaching kids because you get to see them learn,” Baginskis said. “You get to see him grow and that’s beautiful.”
Overall, MakeX serves as a safe space, where ideas run free.
“In some senses, I could say MakeX saved my life,” Baginskis said. “I’ve gone through a lot of difficulties in school and a lot of difficult things in life. I’ve always been able to come to MakeX and build projects and just jam, get in my element and get my hands dirty.”
