UNIVERSITY PARK — Penn State’s Impact Incubator allows classes and organizations to break students’ barriers when it comes to their collaboration skills.
The Impact Incubator is located in the Biobehavioral Health Building and utilizes third-space activities to bring groups together to help improve their collaboration skills.
“The reason that this was unique is we were using third space activities that were curated,” Kerry Small, the director of the Impact Incubator, said. “We would come up with an intervention that would basically send people out to a venue, give them prompts to participate and through those prompts to build skills.”
With help from the Sparc Foundation, the Impact Incubator opened this past summer. They hired a group of student interns to help them do research and test the best ways to achieve their goal of enhancing student’s collaboration skills so that they are able to utilize those skills in any environment whether that be school or work.
“We started off with a few ideas on a dry erase board and a very large vision. And throughout the scope of the year, we were able to really work together, narrow our vision and hone in on a lot of what we want our research to focus on,” Kayla Gaudreault an intern at the Impact Incubator said.
They are able to do this through an app they are currently developing. In this app, it gives students a range of activities they can complete with a group. They range from creating something at 2000 Degrees to attending the Palmer Art Museum or just having a team lunch.
On the app, students can see a list of activities they must complete at each location. To show they completed each activity they must collect “artifacts” which can be submitted as pictures or as statements about their experiences.
However, they realized that these experiences may cost students money that they do not have. The Impact Incubator was able to bridge this gap by giving students gift cards to complete these experiences.
“And so what we did is we went to groups of students, we gave them those catalogs. We actually handed them gift cards,” Small said.
These resources ensure that students will be able to complete these experiences so that they can grow their collaboration skills. Skills that they believe will be very important in students’ lives when they finish their education and enter the workforce.
“We’re really trying to get students to go into third spaces, try new things to really push into new areas and exceed boundaries of collaboration and really translate that into the workforce,” Gaudreault said.
Gaudreault was able to attend different classes over the past year to inform them about the Impact Incubator and how they can utilize it.
“Being able to see the feedback from different students was really rewarding, to feel like a lot of the work that we’re doing does have a strong impact and positive feedback as well,” Gaudreault said.
If you have a class or are in an organization that is interested in utilizing the Impact Incubator you can reach out by emailing kls401@psu.edu.
