Integrated Teaching and Learning Laboratory

Turning Creative Ideas into Real-World Opportunities

Undergraduate student Garrett Earnshaw demonstrates his team's deployable space structure at the ITLL Fall 2000 Design Expo. Teammates Jorgen Grosvold and Bill Pisano look on as Garrett employs the black light and fog machine for dramatic effect.

Sophomore engineering students in GEEN 2400 Invention and Innovation spend a semester experiencing the design-build-test process as they bring their ideas to life. Student teams design and build a prototype of a commercially viable product, investigate the patent process, and develop a feasibility study as they turn their creative ideas into real-world opportunities.

After this hands-on introduction to invention and entrepreneurship, student teams have successfully competed for additional funding from the National Collegiate Inventors and Innovators Alliance to continue product development to the patent stage. Recent new product inventions include an improved telemark ski binding, an innovative lawn watering system that reduces water losses to evaporation, and a two-cam anchor used in rock climbing.

Many freshman students experience their first taste of engineering through the hands-on GEEN 1400 First-Year Engineering Projects course, in which they also encounter the design-build-test cycle that characterizes engineering.

Mechanical engineering senior Seth Murray hangs from a 2Cam Rock Anchor, which he and other students developed through the ITL program. The rock climbing device was selected for a special exhibit at the Smithsonian Institution in spring 2001.

The semester climax for both courses is the ITL Laboratory Design Expo, featuring more than 60 design projects and inventions created by more than 350 undergraduate engineering students during the fall semester. Hundreds of people from the campus and community attend the judged event.

The winning People's Choice Award project in December 2000 was "Frozen Shadows," an interactive learning exhibit designed and fabricated by a first-year student team for a local museum. The exhibit, now at the Collage Children's Museum in Boulder, uses phosphorescent paint to temporarily record shadows of children on the wall of a booth.

In the same spirit of outreach to the community, a National Science Foundation-sponsored program created by the ITL places engineering graduate students in local public school classrooms, effectively extending the college into the community. In elementary through high school classrooms at seven schools, these CU students teach engineering topics in hands-on ways, providing an infusion of content depth for teachers. They also serve as engineering role models, opening students' eyes to the possibility of engineering as their future career path.

http://ITLL.colorado.edu