Skidmore's 创意实验室
Skidmore’s 创意实验室 has grown out of an expansive vision for collaborative, cross-disciplinary 学习. It has its origins in the planning for Skidmore’s Center for Integrated Sciences (CIS), which will bring all of our science departments and programs together with flexible, state-of-the art teaching and research laboratories to create a hub for innovation. With the support of the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations, Skidmore faculty envisioned 创意实验室 as a space within CIS that would combine the philosophies of more traditional innovation centers with digital fabrication and the essence of maker spaces, taking full advantage of the co-location of all of our science programming while also ensuring that CIS will be a teaching and 学习 center for all students. 目标是 create a physical place where teams of students, faculty members, staff, and community members can gather, in the context of a course or a co-curricular activity, to program, prototype, model, and even market their ideas.
During the construction of CIS, the 创意实验室 Steering Committee and makerspace manager 达伦Prodger have embraced the spirit of iterative creation by prototyping the 创意实验室 空间本身. Since 2016, this temporary makerspace (the “Hub”) has embodied the resourcefulness and exploratory design that 创意实验室 aims to cultivate on Skidmore’s 校园. 从 development and refinement of the Hub has emerged the design for the 创意实验室’s permanent home in CIS, which will open in Fall 2022.
From its inception, however, Skidmore’s 创意实验室 has been more than a physical space for making and collaboration; it is also a broad initiative to foster innovative teaching. This less tangible component of 创意实验室 promotes a spirit of pedagogical exploration that disrupts the traditional paradigms in which 学习 takes place on a college 校园. 创意实验室 has supported a range of experiments that challenge the structure of the 15-week semester and reimagine the relationship between faculty and students, and since Spring 2020 has made a metaphorical space for innovative teaching in Skidmore’s curriculum by offering designated 创意实验室 (IL) courses.