Priorities:Boise State University Student Priorities

Strategy #1: Increase Awareness of Innovation and Entrepreneurship in Engineering

Engineering & Innovation Living-Learning Community

• Freshmen students with majors in the College of Innovation and Design and the College of Engineering live together and take a class which involves community service and team building, as well as aspects of the different majors encompassed by CID and Engineering.
• This Living-Learning Community (LLC) was just established (formerly it was only engineering students), and thus could be a great place to prototype the implementation of I&E concepts and engage freshmen with these ideas
• This is also a great place to test the effectiveness of LLCs in creating a community across disciplines

Introduce I&E Concepts in Introduction to Engineering Classes

• All incoming freshmen engineering students are required to take ENGR 120 (Introduction to Engineering) or ENGR 130 (Introduction to Engineering Applications)
• These courses are project-based, and teach students about engineering disciplines, as well as developing critical thinking and provides a "design-oriented engineering experience"
• ENGR 130 involves a service project where students work with a client from the community to apply the engineering design process to solve a problem
• While some design thinking is already a part of these courses, there could be room for the addition of more explicitly human-centered design principles into the curriculum
• This could also be a platform to introduce engineering students to entrepreneurship concepts to which they may not otherwise be exposed 

Promote Growth of Vertically Integrated Projects

• The Vertically Integrated Projects (VIP) Program unites undergraduate education and faculty research in a team-based context
• Undergraduate VIP students earn academic credits, while faculty and graduate students benefit from the design/discovery efforts of their teams
• The Boise State University VIP program is part of a broad national and international consortium of universities
• While this program already exists in an early phase, more work remains to create campus-wide awareness about the vision and purpose of Vertically Integrated Projects in order to attract students and faculty to participate in current and new projects
• This program presents an inherent opportunity for a culture of I&E to thrive in a community of students and faculty from different disciplines across campus
• VIP projects differ from a traditional research lab setting in that the experiences, interests, and abilities of all members - faculty and students alike - are valued equally
• Close-knit VIP teams provide an opportunity to support vulnerable populations of students who might not finish their degrees without a supportive community and mentorship opportunities

Provide Opportunities for Entrepreneurship Mentoring to Engineering Students

• The New Product Development Lab, housed within the College of Engineering, mostly provides rapid prototyping and design consulting services to local businesses and entrepreneurs outside the university, but is also a resource available to student entrepreneurs that is not currently well-publicized
• While Venture College's services are available to all students, and they have been expanding their reach to Computer Science majors, this services is still unknown to most engineering majors
• A goal for the future would be to implement a program which partners engineering students with ideas with mentors from the local entrepreneurship community and/or students from the Business College to help them work toward commercializing their ideas (or co-developing ideas for new ventures)

Strategy #2: Promote Collaboration Across Disciplines on Campus

Promote New and Existing Spaces for Interdisciplinary Collaboration and Idea Generation and Work Toward Making More

• The Honors College provides dorms and multi-disciplinary classes to connect students from different majors
• Some Living-Learning Communities offer cross-disciplinary themes such as fitness, while some are major- or college-specific.
• The MakerLab is a makerspace hosted in the Boise State Library and run by librarians and student employees.  This space is very user-driven, and offers student- and staff-led workshops on technologies such as arduinos and 3D printing.  Students can print designs for free on the two 3D printers.

Host a TEDx Boise Viewing Party

• TEDx tickets are often outside the price range of interested students
• Hosting a live streaming event of the talks would be a great opportunity to foster collaboration and creativity among a group of interested students
• This could be a good "hook" to get students into the event, where we could then direct them to other on- and off-campus resources

Strategy #3: Increase Overall Student Awareness of I&E Concepts and Resources

Create a Website for I&E Resources

• Create a one-page website with links to relevant resources on and off campus
• Publish through the College of Innovation and Design's website
• Advertise the website in department email newsletters across campus
• Try to get a link put on students' my.Boisestate pages

Freshmen Orientation Design Thinking Pop-Up

• Create a design thinking pop-up program as part of freshmen orientation
• Engage students to think about what they want to do in terms of a mission, not just a major

Integrate Design Thinking Concepts into University Foundations Courses

• All incoming Boise State students are required to take these courses
• Each section explores a different concept (e.g. "The History and Future of Education", "Invention and Discovery")
• While innovation is a core part of the mission of the UF program, design thinking is not an explicit part of the curriculum of most sections right now
• This might be another great place to introduce I&E concepts to freshmen

Reach Out to Underserved Groups Through the Institute for STEM and Diversity

• The Institute for STEM and Diversity runs a number of programs aimed at underserved populations such as minorities and students who are the first in their families to go to college
• This could be a great connection to reach out to these populations, who might not otherwise be reached

Strategy #4: Provide Feedback Mechanisms for Students to Give Input to the University Administration

Implement a student satisfaction survey

• The overall intent of this survey would be to gather a significant amount of data on what actual students think of our ideas and of what is currently available on campus right now, to help ground our mission for change in facts and figures
• The use of a Likert scale (e.g. Very good, good, neutral, bad, very bad) could allow students to rate various aspects of their experience (e.g. I&E resources, quality of education, value for tuition, quality of faculty overall, internship and job opportunities, etc.)
• This survey could be dynamic (e.g. questions could change based on identifiers such as major, part-time/full-time, etc.) to gather specific data about different parts of the student population
• Open-ended feedback could allow us to gather new ideas about what students are interested in

Host an event to generate student ideas for campus improvements

• This could be a workshop, or more of a design sprint or hackathon
• We could break out into small teams and document feedback
• A streamlined report could be addressed to the university administration
• Our partnerships with the MakerLab and College of Innovation and Design could provide conduits to implement some ideas

Provide a social feedback system

• Allow students to submit ideas for improving campus online
• Each idea/thread can be upvoted or downvoted and allows comments
• Top upvoted ideas for a given period can be candidates for implementation, or at least get a response from the university administration
• Another approach for an online community could be a slack channel.  A Boise State slack channel already exists, but is not well-publicized outside of the MakerLab and Computer Science communities.

Related Links

Boise State University

Boise State University Student Priorities

University Innovation Fellows

Spring 2016:

Ann Delaney

Kelly Schutt

Rebecka Seward

Fall 2016:

Sienna George

Alexander Schloss

Donovan Kay