Cody Soska (CS 2025, A 2017)

Cody Soska is IDeATe’s Technical Specialist in Hunt Library. He helps students and faculty turn ambitious ideas into real, meaningful artifacts through rapid prototyping workflows, and he keeps the fabrication ecosystem running so creativity is never gated by infrastructure. Cody brings a grounded, evidence-based learning science lens to the lab. His background is in HCI through tangible interaction design, educational design, and design thinking, and he holds a Master’s in Educational Technology and Applied Learning Sciences.

Cody is a life-time CMU learner in every sense of the word. Over nearly three decades he has been here as a Prep School student, Pre-College student, undergraduate, returning undergraduate, and graduate student. That lived experience shapes how he builds explicitly inclusive learning environments. In the lab, he is especially focused on helping people move from legitimate peripheral participation and observation into confident makers who take initiative and form bonds within a diverse community of practice.

He is a member of the Higher Education Makerspaces Initiative and regular attendee and presenter at the International Symposium on Academic Makerspaces (ISAM). Through that community, Cody connects and consults with other lab managers who are starting new spaces or upgrading existing ones, using IDeATe’s approach as a practical model. He’s proud that IDeATe helps lead the field in what collaborative learning spaces can be, and he contributed to planning and hosting ISAM when CMU welcomed the community in 2023.

His specialties include additive manufacturing, digital fabrication, and physical computing. He also develops hands-on learning tools like the Plush Neuron, and he pursues rigorous “mystery-to-method” investigations that apply scientific inquiry, hypothesis testing, and deployable sensing concepts to unusual claims, including lake-monster folklore. The point is not spectacle; it is scientific literacy, careful measurement, and open, falsifiable methods that help learners practice real-world evidence-building. Outside IDeATe, Cody is a professional organist, a forager, and a dedicated strength athlete.