Crockett, R. S., & York, J. L., & Katona, T. M. (2015, June), Innovation Sandbox: Engineers in a Multidisciplinary Playground  Paper presented at 2015 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition, Seattle, Washington. 10.18260/p.24305

\bibitem{asee_peer_24305}
  Crockett, R. S., \& York, J. L., \& Katona, T. M. (2015, June), \emph{Innovation Sandbox: Engineers in a Multidisciplinary Playground}
  Paper presented at 2015 ASEE Annual Conference \& Exposition, Seattle, Washington.
  10.18260/p.24305

Robert S Crockett, Jonathan L. York, and Thomas M. Katona.  "Innovation Sandbox: Engineers in a Multidisciplinary Playground".  2015 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition, Seattle, Washington, 2015, June.  ASEE Conferences, 2015.  https://peer.asee.org/24305 Internet.  25 Apr, 2024

\bibitem{asee_peer_24305}
  Robert S Crockett, Jonathan L. York, and Thomas M. Katona.
  "Innovation Sandbox: Engineers in a Multidisciplinary Playground".
  \emph{2015 ASEE Annual Conference \& Exposition, Seattle, Washington, 2015, June}.
  ASEE Conferences, 2015.
  https://peer.asee.org/24305 Internet.  25 Apr, 2024

@INPROCEEDINGS{asee_peer_24305
author = "Robert S Crockett, Jonathan L. York, and Thomas M. Katona"
title = "Innovation Sandbox: Engineers in a Multidisciplinary Playground"
booktitle = "2015 ASEE Annual Conference \& Exposition"
year = "2015"
month = "June"
address = "Seattle, Washington"
publisher = "ASEE Conferences"
note = {https://peer.asee.org/24305}
number = {10.18260/p.24305}
}

TY  - CPAPER
AB  -        Innovation Sandbox: Engineers in a Multidisciplinary PlaygroundInnovation Sandbox is a physical and programmatic environment where students of all academiclevels and majors across campus can come together to explore and develop their early-stageideas. The goal is to stimulate creative play outside the traditional academic environmentthrough a mix of formal and informal engagement. This space allows innovations to progressbeyond a single classroom project or exercise, but decouples innovation from a particular courseor department, making it a true separated space devoted to team based and individual ideation.Content is driven by participants and facilitated by Student Mentors who ensure that there is alow barrier to entry. The Mentors assist with simple fabrication, facilitate connections withfaculty and other campus resources, and provide mentoring/coaching and design input toprogram participants.Due to the technical nature of many of the innovations, the College of Engineering was an earlyand enthusiastic adopter of the program, serving as both a source of expertise (e.g. fabrication,coding) and as the largest pool of participants. Through involvement and sponsorship of theUniversity-wide Center for Innovation & Entrepreneurship, the program is broadening andmaturing. Engineering students are seeing significant benefits from working with diverse majorson designs that sometimes involve technology in only a minor supporting role. This type ofproblem solving develops abstract, innovative “soft” skills that complement the technical depththey develop in their traditional curriculum. These skills are critical to producing engineers thatcan thrive in a global environment. At our institution, engineering students are provided manyopportunities in the classroom to develop technology innovations through class projects, seniorprojects, internships, and as part of their regular instruction. However, the environment is notreadily available to facilitate the progression of student directed innovations, nor is it suited fortruly interdisciplinary efforts. Innovation Sandbox is a promising solution.Grassroots efforts over the past year have laid the foundation for a successful program. Currentactivities involve turning these early efforts into a durable program with appropriate assessmenttools that is fully integrated into the broader institutional goal of increasing innovation campuswide. The overarching goal of Innovation Sandbox is to change the culture of our students toembrace innovation. Assessment of demonstrable outcomes covering innovation, creativity,design, communication, and multidisciplinary activities is a high priority, to formalize the valueof the program and support ABET accreditation activities. This paper discusses our process ofdeveloping, implementing, and validating assessment methods that are appropriate not only forengineering, but other participating colleges. Specifically, we seek to establish and quantify alink between skills developed through play in a voluntary, extra-curricular program and the skillsrequired to meet the global engineering challenges of the future.
AU  - Robert S Crockett
AU  - Jonathan L. York
AU  - Thomas M. Katona
CY  - Seattle, Washington
DA  - 2015/06/14
PB  - ASEE Conferences
TI  - Innovation Sandbox: Engineers in a Multidisciplinary Playground
UR  - https://peer.asee.org/24305
DO  - 10.18260/p.24305
ER  -