Next Tuesday May 15 will be our first Innovation Nexus planning meeting! The “Innovation Nexus” is meant to be both a physical space for innovation, ideation and creation, and also a center to support innovative teaching, to bring together students, faculty, staff and external partners around interdisciplinary team-based projects. While it has engineering at its heart, it’s really meant to be something that serves the whole campus and acts as a catalyst for innovative thinking and teaching.

Some of the specific things we’re interested in developing:

– A Coding Studio, providing support and training for students of all majors who are interested in applying programming concepts to their projects.

– Support for team-based teaching, linked classes, “drop-in” modules that can be plugged into other classes, and co-curricular activities such as hackathons and design challenges that encourage cross-disciplinary collaboration.

– Training and support for faculty to  bring design thinking and project-based learning into current classes.

– Development of a physical space (and accompanying equipment) to support ideation, prototyping, fabrication, testing and computation.

– Engagement with outside partners on real-world team-based projects, ideally spanning multiple semesters.