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This past January, PBS aired an episode of “The Art Show” featuring Sinclair Community College’s very own Guitar Lab in its first segment. Over the course of about 10 minutes, the episode briefly covered the process of building a guitar in the lab and the importance of applying STEM outside of the classroom.
The members of the Guitar Lab took great pride in the episode and were happy to be given the opportunity. They also admit that the entire thing was a fluke.
Andrew Shaffer, the Guitar Lab’s operations manager and senior lab tech, recounts the story of how the PBS special came to be. “There was an individual who was taking one of the Physical Education classes and she told her friend that worked for PBS that she ought to go down to Sinclair,” he said. “I guess she was walking by and was like ‘What is that?’ She stopped in and she asked ‘What do you do here?’ I told her and she was like ‘Do you think it would be alright if we did a story on you?’”
After sending the request up the chain of command and getting approval, filming was allowed to begin. There was just one problem. For the episode, PBS wanted footage of a guitar being made from start to finish. The regular course that Sinclair offers does so over four months. Luckily, there was a training event last summer where members would build the guitar over the course of a week instead.
“It was almost like it was meant to be,” Shaffer adds. “The universe said, ‘Yes, this will happen.’ If it was another time, it would have been very difficult for them to film the entire process, but it was perfect.”
Two months after capturing footage of the training event, PBS returned to film the team producing the kits that they ship out across the world. This is a day-to-day task of the Guitar Lab team. From Alaska to Germany to Columbia, the Guitar Lab sells and ships kits to STEM programs not just across the country but internationally as well.
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“We were known more nationwide and outside the country than we were in Sinclair,” said Josh Kemper, a member who has been with the Guitar Lab for five years. Kemper has a love for STEM and seeing its applications in the real world through actual crafting. By working with the Guitar Lab, he hopes to share this love with students getting into STEM programs via building guitars.
“What formulas you’re using and what problems you’re doing, you can see the results in front of you. It makes it easier to understand and this is a lot more fun than a bird house,” Kemper said.
Dion Johnson, Multimedia Specialist