Innovation – Page 3 – Innovation Lab

Introducing: Design Build Challenge!

Background This year I’ve scripted the curriculum for NOVA Lab a bit more tightly during the first marking period. In the past, things were more open, exploratory, and…well…chaotic (see map below). There was a beauty to that. We discovered opportunities, lunged at hunches, and explored numerous though tangential paths of thought. But also a lotContinue reading “Introducing: Design Build Challenge!”

Natalie Nixon–Wonder And Rigor for a Flourishing Life

Back in October of 2020, Natalie Nixon, Creativity Consultant Extraordinaire and author of The Creativity Leap, Zoomed in to talk to NOVA Lab students about Wonder, Rigor, and living a life driven by creativity. It’s an enriching and amazing presentation that I will be sharing with classes for years to come. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1P4_irkkFjpTyTjIWSzCuOkDh0z4-lEmt/preview

You Are Where We Need You To Be

What do you do as an innovative learner when Life throws you a COVID-19 Curveball…?

Purpose and the Story We Tell Ourselves: Wayfinding our own Oceans.

In 1995, the prolific warbler Neil Young (and members of Pearl Jam) released Mirror Ball. The album featured one of Young’s iconic cries of independence, “I’m the Ocean.” With a chorus declaring the title’s metaphysical conceit and lyrics probing smaller, stranger metaphysical comparisons (eg. “I’m an accident/I was driving way too fast), Young contrasts beingContinue reading “Purpose and the Story We Tell Ourselves: Wayfinding our own Oceans.”

The Most Amazing Day(s): Teaching as Experience Design

For the past few days, ever since inNOVAtion Lab’s phenomenal trip to Corbett Inc.’s Fluxspace, I’ve been trying to figure out what has been happening in class. The trip to Flux was a highlight of a very young year, and it comes on the heels of another highlight, our trip to the B.Phl Innovation Festival Continue reading “The Most Amazing Day(s): Teaching as Experience Design”

Learning in Flux: The Joy of Purpose-Based Education

At the beginning of the year, I discovered that a local design firm in my neighborhood was opening an incubator/maker/presentation/learning space in a turn of the 20th-century woollen mill. Dubbed Flux, the space was exactly what I have been trying to create in my own school, only about 7 times bigger! So I had toContinue reading “Learning in Flux: The Joy of Purpose-Based Education”

Innovation: “This Must Be the Place”

When I was barely in 9th grade, I first encountered the music of Talking Heads. It was the summer of 1983, and Speaking in Tounges was on heavy rotation on my Sony Walkman as I sat on a rusting, red Wheel Horse tractor cutting acres of grass for my house and my neighbor’s. Hours of idle passesContinue reading “Innovation: “This Must Be the Place””

Brains, Cheetos, and a Theory of Creativity

(The final installment of my blog posts about the B.Phl Innovation Festival. Here’s the first post. Here’s the second.) On Thursday, Oct. 17, 2019, 31 of the 54 students enrolled in NOVA Lab attended the third day of the first annual B.Phl Innovation Festival. While our trip was somewhat shortened (traffic on the abominable SchukyllContinue reading “Brains, Cheetos, and a Theory of Creativity”

A Day in the Life of a BPhl Innovation Festival Attendee

This was a long week, but I wish it were longer. And that is due to the B.Phl Innovation festival. Centered at the Independence Blue Cross (IBX) building (1901 Market), with Ground Zero being the IBX Innovation Center on the 13th and 14th floors. However, the festival spread out around the city, from the UniversityContinue reading “A Day in the Life of a BPhl Innovation Festival Attendee”