Student Projects

What follows is a list of student projects by semester for the Innovation Illinois courses that includes a description from students on their projects. We thank the Center for Innovation in Teaching and Learning, DRES, the Prairie Futures research cluster, the Student Life and Culture Archives, and the University Archives for their assistance in piloting and promoting the course!

Note: Most student video projects are closed as part of their MediaSpace permissions due to their use of materials found in the University of Illinois archives. Those with Illinois credentials may find the video projects on the MediaSpace website.

 

Spring 2018

Adaptive Sports UIUC
Che Ellis


In my video project, I focused on the University of Illinois’s role in changing adaptive sports. They have a long and rich history with which I not only overviewed, but also pulled out some specific noteworthy parts of its history. The beginning of the video gave some background on why adaptive sports started becoming so big at the University of Illinois. I thought it was important to include the thoughts of Timothy J Nugent on the subject of physical activity because the whole program was brought up because of him. I showed some archival images and videos of people in wheelchairs playing some sports while talking about how sports helped these people. Afterwards, there was an interview clip of Timothy J. Nugent himself, saying how these sports helped his students in his own words. The video then gets into the changes that happened at the University of Illinois because of people like Brad Hedrick. There is also interview clips of Brad Hedrick talking about how the work that he did greatly affected the disabled athletes and how he truly changed the game for adaptive sports. Along with his interview clips there are videos of some of the training drills wheelchair basketball players did. The video then steps away from the change in tactics and information to the change of actual hardware. I talk over some clips of the evolution of wheelchairs and racing gloves, about the innovations that came out of the University and then we get to hear from Brad Hedrick again about how he helped students get this better designed wheelchairs. Finally, I talk about why people would want to attend the University of Illinois and close with an interview clip of a very successful alumni, Jean Driscoll.

 

Complexity, Cybernetics, and Design
Suryaa Murali


Many of the grand challenges we face today are intertwined. As Joi Ito points out we need to shift to a 2nd Order Cybernetics perspective on approaching problem. Rather than having a controls theory vision on tackling these problems. We need more of a holistic approach. I think that’s why I resonate with Design as Participation. I think a huge motivating factor for this project really resonates with the fact that a lot of it is grounded in the environment being the complex adaptive system. Personally I’m interested in how climate change affects the planet, and the quote above makes it pretty obvious the direction in which we need to head into. It really made a connection with my other interest in Interface Design: “The modern meaning of the word “interface,” referring to “a means or place of interaction between two systems,”” (Hoxie).

See Suryaa’s ongoing work thinking through these issues on his Medium space!

 

The Discovery of a New Domain of Life
Alex Kozuch


Initially, Biologists believed that all life on Earth belonged to two domains: Eukaryotes, which include animals, plants, and fungi, and Prokaryotes, which include bacteria. This was until Carl Richard Woese, an American microbiologist, pioneered the discovery of a single celled prokaryotic organism called Archaea. This lead much of the scientific community to define a third domain of life. Woese and his American colleague Ralph S Wolfe, found that prokaryotes are made up of two distinct organisms that differ both biochemically and genetically. These organisms were divided into two groups: Eubacteria and Archaea. Archaea thrive in extreme environments, and since these conditions resemble Earth’s early environment, these organisms may have been the first life form on Earth, which can help to describe early cellular evolution. In 1996 Woese and his colleague from The University of Illinois published the first complete genome of a species in the archaea domain. Astonishingly, they found that Archaea are more closely related to Eukaryotes than to Prokaryotes. This assessment and its later publication helped cease constant criticism Woese’s team received for trying to disprove a well-established conflicting theory defining only Prokaryotes and Eukaryotes.

 

DRES Wheelchair Innovations
Helen Youn


My pitch for this project is how exactly the DRES program started at the University of Illinois and how the innovations that have been created through DRES have helped those with disabilities throughout the years. Specifically focusing on students with wheelchairs, I wanted to learn more about the daily struggles they go through as well as how the innovations presented at UIUC has helped them complete their college experience.

 

DRES Final Project
Jason McGrath


For my final project, I wanted to showcase how ahead of the times and how innovative the University of Illinois was and is in terms of being ahead of the game and making life as regular as possible for students with disabilities. In order to display this as accurately as possible, I used a Brad Hedrick interview and turned it into an Imovie. The reason for this is Brad came from a different background, he firstly came here as a student in 1977 and later on, when he was older, started running the school for students with disabilities. The reason I only used one of the interviews of Brad Hedrick is because of how on topic the same interview is, and how the entire interview describes how the University of Illinois was not only one of the first schools to be innovative with students with disabilities, but he also describes how the university continues to be innovative with disabled students.

 

Project 1000
Kamil Piotrowski

The first time that I have heard of Project 1000 was online through Facebook from the Black United Front student organization. It caught my interest because it is taking place in the present and is happening around me. I wanted to learn about something that is happening around me and is something that I can relate to. This topic is important because it continues the mission of diversifying the student body and is allowing minorities to have better opportunities at a secondary education. Project 1000 is also important for the school as it is the next step in the evolution of the student body to be able to represent all types of different students. In order to complete my project I decide to use Scalar books over making an iMovie. Project 1000 included a lot of history from Project 500 as well as its own information on the present day movement. By using Scalar books I was better able to fully explain how Project 500 was the basis for Project 1000 and then was able to dive into the details of Project 1000. I split up the book by using different pages with different topics that all tie back to Project 1000. The first page was an introduction to Project 1000 and goes over the basic information about and ties it back to other innovative movements that took place on campus. The next two pages were then dedicated to explaining important figures and their impact in Project 500. This was necessary because explaining Project 500 gave a huge insight on Project 1000. After that I explained the Black United Front and how they are the forefront fighters in Project 1000. After that I made a page on Project 1000 in social media which was basically all Twitter and Facebook posts. The last page was a conclusion that explained Project 1000 on how it is innovative and summarized the movement in general. The content selection was crucial because I was able to describe the key figures in both movements, groups involved, and overall impact of both movements.

 

Sustainable Innovation at Illinois
Emily Langtiw

Student-centered, sustainable innovation at the University of Illinois has captured my interest early on in my college career, and it has, to no surprise, become the center of my entire final project. Fostered by the idea of the land grant institution that the University strives towards, student initiative has given Illinois a unique voice in sustainability. Because I am an advocate for being a leader and being the first, I feel that my project has properly showcased the environmental initiatives that people are involved in on campus since the 1970s.

 

Fall 2017

Elevating Cross Department Collaboration with DRES
Aaron Navarro

Former DRES director Brad Hedrick talks about working with the ECE to make campus elevators more accessible.

 

University of Illinois Disability Athletics: Modest Goals and their Grand Success
Luke Cooper

A Video Story on the greater purposes and goals of the University of Illinois disability athletics program.

 

Disneyland of Wheelchair
Pingping Bian

This is a story about Brad Hedrick and DRES program, a program, which he has served for years. He tells how he landed to University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign and his first impression about the campus. Though his narration, the remarkable attention UIUC had paid to disability students in history has showed to us.