Our educational concept

How we work

The Student Repair Shop is open to the general public for 90 minutes on one or two days per week. During opening hours, customers bring objects in need of repair to the Shop, where students take their orders with the help of a receipt-of-order form. Repair teams, consisting of two students each, will then examine the items themselves and try to find out what exactly needs to be repaired. If they are not able to proceed, students will then turn to the Internet – to YouTube videos, for example, manufacturers’ websites or repair forums – for more information. If they still can’t complete the repair, the teams will then consult one of the volunteer repair instructors to see if they can come up with a solution together. The students will order any replacement parts needed, and any plastic parts that are no longer available can be drafted by the students using a CAD program and then reproduced using a 3D printer. Aside from any costs for spare parts that may arise, all repairs are free of charge for the customer. Voluntary donations – to be used exclusively for shop equipment and supplies – are gladly accepted.

Repairing things develops competencies

The Student Repair Shop is run based on methods of discovery- and experiential work and learning. The goal of these methods is to explore any given task and to figure out how to successfully complete it and everything related to its solution through one's own activities. This supports comprehensive competency development through practical learning.
Competencies are not developed by passively absorbing knowledge; they can only be developed through actively and independently dealing with complex situations. Repairing things in the Student Repair Shop is particularly well-suited for this: When a device doesn’t work, what exactly is wrong with it usually isn’t clear, so students have to look for possible sources of the problem and develop their own ideas for how to approach the repair. In the process, students are not only learning a lot about an individual device and how to repair it successfully. At the same time, they are developing skills and attitudes that can be transferred to other settings – they are building competencies, i.e. they are learning to combine knowledge and skills that they can then use to deal with previously unknown situations and to cope with them successfully >>Read more>>