Inquiry to Innovation
Inquiry to Innovation is an honors seminar that gives students a chance to try and solve real world problems in our community. The problem that our class sought out to fix was how can the students of UC be more effective stakeholders in Burnet Woods? In order to answer this question we first learned a series of techniques such gamestorming, reframing the question, asking what if's, and playing the fool. Once we had studied these new innovative thinking tools we had to put them to the test and find how they could be used to find more creative and effective solutions. Another important topic of the class was trans-disciplinary collaboration. Groups were made up of students with different majors, skills, and backgrounds in order to get different perspectives of the task at hand.
This seminar has proven to be very beneficial to me. The thought processes and exercises as well as the introduction to trans-disciplinary work will follow with me through my other classes as well as my career. All through life I'll have to work in teams with different skills and abilities to achieve a given result and the tools I was shown in Inquiry to Innovation will guide me to creative answers and questions we didn't even know we should be asking. My team is in the process of continuing on and fulfilling the final project we had proposed at the end of the seminar. We have plans to start a new student organization and along with a large scale service event! Something I never would have dreamed I could do had it not been for Inquiry to Innovation.
Having finished this seminar I have taken away a new way to look at problem-solving. In current courses I find myself thinking back to the skills I learned and how we could achieve our solution in an unexpected way. What I've taken away is a mentality that maybe the first right answer isn't the best right answer and that it's possible that the question your trying to answer isn't even the question to be asking. What I got out of this class is an open mind.
This seminar has proven to be very beneficial to me. The thought processes and exercises as well as the introduction to trans-disciplinary work will follow with me through my other classes as well as my career. All through life I'll have to work in teams with different skills and abilities to achieve a given result and the tools I was shown in Inquiry to Innovation will guide me to creative answers and questions we didn't even know we should be asking. My team is in the process of continuing on and fulfilling the final project we had proposed at the end of the seminar. We have plans to start a new student organization and along with a large scale service event! Something I never would have dreamed I could do had it not been for Inquiry to Innovation.
Having finished this seminar I have taken away a new way to look at problem-solving. In current courses I find myself thinking back to the skills I learned and how we could achieve our solution in an unexpected way. What I've taken away is a mentality that maybe the first right answer isn't the best right answer and that it's possible that the question your trying to answer isn't even the question to be asking. What I got out of this class is an open mind.