Diane Rhodes did not know anything about the Community College Innovation Challenge prior to Xavier Cotton, a student in her computer science courses at Front Range Community College, and Cristian Madrazo, asking her to mentor their team last year in mid-February.
She had one condition: They had to answer her daily emails.
“The heavy lifting was on them. I was just making sure they got to the end zone. I was just keeping them on track,” she said.
Apply for the 2023 Community College Innovation Challenge by March 30.
The Colorado college’s team won second place in the 2022 CCIC for its concept for a floating drone that uses mats made of human hair to clean up oil spills. Although Rhodes did not understand the technical details of the proposal that Cotton and Madrazo developed in an engineering design course, she thought it was “sensational” from the start.
Cotton describes Rhodes as the team’s “No. 1 cheerleader.”
Spreading the word
Now Rhodes is promoting the CCIC. She shared information about it with all the computer science educators in the Colorado Community College system at its statewide committee meeting in September. This semester, as a new faculty member at Red Rocks Community College, Rhodes emailed the 2023 CCIC application info to colleagues and all her students. (Madrazo promoted CCIC in an article for Front Range’s blog.)
“As educators, we ought to be preparing our students for the workforce. The CCIC experience combined the students’ education technical curriculum with skill development that they can carry to real-world business experience. This combination makes the experience all-encompassing and very enjoyable and rewarding,” she wrote in an email.
Phi Theta Kappa will host a free webinar “The Community College Innovation Challenge – Why You Should Apply!” at 2 p.m. (ET) on February 28.
The American Association of Community Colleges offers the national competition in partnership with the National Science Foundation to enable community college students to discover and demonstrate their capacity to use science, technology, engineering and math to make a difference in the world and to translate that knowledge into action.
Rhodes reflected on her favorite parts of the CCIC Innovation Boot Camp, which included 12 finalist teams selected on their innovative solutions outlined in written entries and 90-second videos. She liked the lessons on how to pitch and marketing ideas taught by entrepreneurs and industry professionals during the five-day camp last summer in Washington, D.C.
She learned from the experts, too.
“We can all use experience on how to pitch an idea,” she said. “While I’m computer science, I still have to do some marketing if I want to get my enrollment up. I have to let high schools and businesses know my program is out here.”
For Rhodes, the best part of CCIC was watching all the teams display their scientific posters at the Library of Congress and tell people about their innovations.
“They were glowing. Not just my students. All of them,” she said.
Applying lessons learned
The poster session also made a big impression on Joseph M. Sivo, the physics professor who mentored the Bergen Community College team that won the 2022 CCIC with its “Scan Can” innovation for recycling. Luis De Abreu, Bergen’s STEM program director, also mentored the team.
For several years, the New Jersey college has held events where the dozens of students who complete paid internships in its STEM Student Research Center share posters about their projects.
Related article: Final pitches and the 2022 CCIC winners
“Before CCIC, the posters were very technical,” Sivo explained. Based on what he and De Abreu saw at CCIC, last summer they began encouraging students to reduce the technical details and jargon on their posters and highlight their project’s attributes.
“You want to show what this revolutionary product is and who your potential customer is going to be,” Sivo said.
Since the CCIC boot camp, De Abreu said the college has added formal instruction about how to make an “elevator pitch” to the curriculum used by the speech coaches who work with interns for about 20 hours during the summer. In addition to conducting research with a faculty mentor, the Bergen interns attend micro-courses and do service learning.
De Abreu has been promoting CCIC to the research interns and he anticipates that at least one and possibly two Bergen student research groups will submit projects to this year’s competition. In addition to winning last year’s contest, a team of Bergen research interns qualified for the 2021 CCIC finalist phase.
“By all means, I encourage all colleges to participate and make it to the finalist rounds because it’s that one that gets the VIP treatment,” he said.
