Initiative pushes creativity, innovation, creation

A group of faculty believe that putting knowledge to work through creative, hands-on projects leads to innovation. With that in mind, they are looking to generate support for what they call a proposal and an invitation for the ‘MakeIT at SUNYIT Creativity and Innovations Initiative.” During a recent Provost Lecture Series presentation, Daryl Lee, associate professor of humanities; Amos Confer, assistant professor of computer science; and Mohammad Abdallah, assistant professor of electrical engineering technology, laid out the path that they feel SUNYIT can follow, leading its students, as well as the community to a world of inventors and makers.

“People may not think of themselves as inventors today, but as makers,” Lee said, pointing to the growth of the DIY (“Do It Yourself”) Community and market, along with the rising interest in online marketplaces like Etsy, or “crowdfunding” sources such as Kickstarter. “These are enterprises fueled by a drive for creativity to do it ourselves. It’s a sign of a possible counterculture that we should be paying attention to.”

This counterculture is driving the minds that will create our tomorrow, but do so in a new way from the industry-driven methods that society may have become accustomed to. According to Lee, people who make things are driven by certain ideals including a desire to work with the tangible; and they take pleasure in making something real.

Lee, Confer and Abdallah believe that SUNYIT can become a regional leader in the shift from a country of consumers to a country of makers, but to do so requires a three-part plan: Infrastructure, Curriculum and Outreach.

The infrastructure portion, Lee says involves creating a ‘maker space’ on the SUNYIT campus; a place to explore the desire to create and share knowledge among each other. However, Lee points out that it would require much more than just a setting.

“‘If you build it they will come’ is not always true,” Lee said.” That’s why curriculum is important to the proposal.” The curriculum component involves the creation of an academic minor in creativity and innovation, and the outreach component refers to the importance of seeking off-campus community involvement as well.

Confer said that through his own classes and labs, he has watched students become empowered, gaining confidence in their abilities by stepping outside of their comfort zones and specialty to try projects that require different skills. “As students begin their academic careers, they often lack the confidence and empowerment to handle high technology,” he said.

In a project his classes took on, Confer and his students used old telephone parts and other pieces of outdated technology to create new things, including a computer game they called “Squash-a-Squid,” similar to “Whack-a-Mole,” and a quasi-Etch-a-Sketch device. As the projects progressed, so did students’ confidence of the students. “It looked junky, so it wasn’t intimidating to a student, even though it was high-tech,” Confer said. “As they get better at this, as they get more empowered, the students take more risks and build bigger projects.”

Abdallah described a student who, while struggling in class, had the creativity and drive from what he was learning to create something remarkable: a robot that would sense when the user was going to fire a gun at a target and shoot back. “The student spent all summer in his basement continuing the project,” he said, adding that the project became even more sophisticated than the prototype built in the lab. The student sent his results to Abdallah via a YouTube video, showing just what he had accomplished. Abdallah said he was astonished to find that a student who had almost failed the course was so inspired and driven by the force to create, that he had devoted his summer to continuing his project outside of school and after the class had ended.

It is this type of drive, this urge to create, that Abdallah, Confer and Lee hope can be bottled, harnessed, and spread across campus and beyond, starting with their proposed Creativity and Innovations Initiative.