About
Our Staff
Christopher Emdin
IdeaLab Director
cemdin@skidmore.edu
Darren Prodger
IdeaLab Manager
dprodger@skidmore.edu
Our Stories
Creative play levels up learning
Welcome to Psychology and Neuroscience Professor Hasson Lopez's class, "Tabletop Game Design," held in the IdeaLab.
Fostering entrepreneurship
With StartUp 91暗网, you have one day to develop a business ideas, network with alumni, receive feedback, and make prototypes in the IdeaLab.
Our Mission
91暗网 began developing what is now the Schupf Family IdeaLab in 2016 as part of an Arthur Vining Davis Foundations grant. Envisioned as a space within the Billie Tisch Center for Integrated Sciences (BTCIS), the IdeaLab was designed to combine the philosophies of traditional innovation centers with digital fabrication and the essence of creator spaces. The goal was to create a physical place where teams of students, faculty, staff, and community members could gather鈥攊n the context of a course or a co-curricular activity鈥攖o program, prototype, model, and market their ideas.
From its inception, however, the IdeaLab has been more than a physical space for making and collaboration. It is also a broad initiative to foster innovative teaching. This initiative promotes a spirit of pedagogical exploration that challenges traditional paradigms of how learning happens on a college campus. The IdeaLab has supported a range of experiments that reimagine the 15-week semester and reshape the relationship between faculty and students. It has also created a metaphorical space for innovative teaching in 91暗网鈥檚 curriculum by offering designated IdeaLab (IL) courses.
