Collaboratively innovating in CCAC's Innovation Lab

A room itself is just a box. What might make a box an innovative one?

Digital documentation of innovation by guests at the Community College of Allegheny County's ribbon cutting ceremony for its newly constructed innovation lab. 15 January, 2018: CCAC North Campus.

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Revolutionary tech innovation: Alan Turing's thinking machines
Innovation by students at CCAC
Innovation Mind-map group exercise (Seed AND responses!)
The catalysts to tech innovation: Why technology is such an innovative "space" these days
Video of session (10-minutes, hosted by YouTube)

CCAC Innovation Lab open house attendees standing and occasionally participating in this event

Attendees during the presentation on which this page is based on 15 January, 2018 at CCAC North Campus's new Innovation Lab.

Examples of innovation

Innovations aren't things that "get outdated"; rather, they become raw material for more innovation. As Alan Turing's code breaking machine which aided in war against the Nazi regime in WWII involved an innovative approach to problem solving. His clever method (documented in his 1936 paper ) of representing and manipulating all computable values by a machine--in binary--is the mathematical basis of each and every modern day digital computer.

Alan Turing's "The Bombe" (An odd name, indeed...)

Replica of Alan Turing's "The Bombe" computing machines used to break German Naval codes encrypted with the Enigma machine. Credit: Tom Yates, photographer, shared on the Wikimedia commons.

Innovation in CCAC Classes

Students in CCAC's computer classes cultivate their own scale of innovation through projects and sharing those projects with others.

Students studying Java built their final projects by studying one of these project starter seeds created by their peers during the course of the semester. Students coded in the spirit of collaborative coding, which is an innovative concept that has driven much of software running today's World Wide Web and the Internet.

Emily J.'s cold war simulation project represents an innovative way of contributing to our Intro to Computer Class's exercise in documenting human systems in spreadsheets with throwbacks to the Cold War. This link is to a directory listing of her sample spreadsheets and activity outline--free for teachers to steal :)

Innovation Mind-mapping

We discussed this sample flow chart of innovative concepts grouped by category. The flow of the arrows represents both formal and conceptual connections between innovative entities. Guests were invited to contribute their own ideas by attaching nodes to any one of these categories posted on the lab's new double-sided dry-erase pods.

[Tool documentation: These images were taken with a Cannon D5300 and processed with GIMP, the free, open source, and community-supported image manipulation program written for and running on Ubuntu Linux , a free and open source operating system which runs most of The Internet.]

Business-Related innovation ideas

Mind-map ideas related to business innovation contributed by guests

Elements of an innovative environment

Mind-map ideas related to innovative environments contributed by guests

Energy-related innovation

Mind-map ideas related to Energy Inovation contributed by guests

Characteristics of innovative groups

Mind-map ideas related to groups of innovation contributed by guests

Barriers to innovation

Catalytic attributes of technology innovation

The technology field has become the go-to reference point for modern innovation. It changes fast, and its contributions and impacts on our day-to-day life are enormous. The following shapes contain factors that contribute to the near continuous bursts of technology innovation today.

Page created on 24 Jan 2018 and last updated on 25 Jan 2018 and can be freely reproduced according to the site's content use agreement.