Glendale Community College opened its $7.5 million STEAMworks Innovation Center on Thursday, Sept. 17, adding a purpose-built space for virtual reality, robotics, digital fabrication and advanced-manufacturing training at the college’s main campus.
The 10,000-square-foot center at 6000 W. Olive Ave. is now open to GCC students and faculty. Its equipment includes 3D printers, CNC routers, laser cutters, mills, lathes, welding stations and drone technology, according to ABC15’s report from Thursday’s ribbon cutting.
The opening gives West Valley students another local route into technical fields as semiconductor, aerospace, construction and advanced-manufacturing employers expand across the region. That broader pipeline includes Amkor Technology’s planned $12 billion Peoria semiconductor packaging campus and the supplier activity developing around TSMC in north Phoenix.
What is inside STEAMworks
The building is organized around two main areas. One is a virtual- and augmented-reality room for immersive simulations. The other is a maker space where students can design and build physical projects with fabrication, machining, welding and drone equipment.
Project architect Holly Street Studio describes additional design details that help explain how the facility is intended to work. The central career and technical education workshop has high ceilings for indoor drone testing, a large collaborative workbench area, testing and exhibition zones, and dedicated storage, exhaust and ventilation. An adjacent mixed-reality studio uses specialized acoustic construction and overhead rigging for different simulation and play-testing setups.
The project began as a study of whether underused classroom space could be enclosed and converted. The college instead moved forward with a separate new building after faculty and district stakeholders defined the needs of engineering, robotics, drone and mixed-reality programs, according to the architect.
Two public cost figures describe the project
GCC officials described the completed initiative as an investment of roughly $7.5 million, up from an original $1 million concept. ABC15 reported that grants supplied most of the funding, including a $5 million STEM grant.
Holly Street Studio’s project page lists a $4.7 million cost for the building project. The available public descriptions do not explain the $2.8 million difference. The figures may cover different portions of the broader investment, such as the structure, technology, equipment or program development, but neither source provides a line-item reconciliation. The $7.5 million figure is the college’s stated total for the center at opening.
Industry input and community access
College officials said programs using the center were developed with feedback from more than 20 industry partners per program. Organizations identified in Thursday’s announcement included Boeing, Intel, Honeywell, NASA and the Arizona Department of Homeland Security. GCC also cited ASU, GCON and McCarthy Construction as partners shaping construction-management instruction.
Those partnerships represent curriculum input, not a guarantee of employment for students. GCC’s stated goal is to keep equipment and instruction aligned with the skills employers expect in engineering technology, advanced manufacturing, programming and construction management.
The college also plans to use STEAMworks for K-12 robotics and engineering competitions, summer camps and other community outreach. Dates, registration details and public-access rules for those programs had not been posted as of Thursday evening.
Glendale Community College is part of the Maricopa County Community College District and serves more than 10,000 students across its main and north campuses, according to the district’s GCC profile.
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