Our motto

See amazing in every student

Our mission

The Amazing Lab wants to be a place where creativity is fostered and learning takes place.  A nexus between experimentation, knowledge and purpose.

In a perfect world, a good professor will always want to change the world and a good student will always be motivated to learn. Unfortunately, this is a naïve assumption, as a quick look into reality will reveal that things are not meant to be that way. Ideals often succumb to the hardships and raw nature of real human endeavors and, unfortunately, neither professors nor students are immune to that. Disenchantment follows disappointment and, from them on, most will only try to keep up with what needs to be done. A lot could be said, and much more has been written, about the root causes of this situation. We believe this is not a hopeless case – something must and can be done, although it is obviously difficult, as there are multiple probable causes and it’s not feasible to individually address them all.

What if we could empower people to take care of the problem?

Experience has shown that, once in a while, joy still emerges during the learning process, when people experience the feeling of accomplishment and pride for solving a problem on their own. We believe this is something that, if properly nurtured, can attract people to embark on a journey whose ultimate goal won’t be about creating a good learning environment, at least not as much as to stimulate the desire to learn, which is what really matters. Knowledge is key, purpose provides aim, but motivation makes things happen. Bloom’s taxonomy provides an explanation for this. Each human being has inherent potential – the real problem lies in finding a way of unleashing it.

Our take on this revolves around the concept of the Amazing Lab. The Amazing Lab won’t be a conventional laboratory, but rather a mix of makerspace and mentoring space. Instead of just providing resources to students, in an unsupervised (and potentially disastrous) way, the Amazing Lab aims at reuniting again the DEI community. Resources will be available for students to tinker with, under supervision:

• By lab supervisors, recruited and rewarded – older students from PhD or MsC courses with proven vocation, who ensure the space is never left unattended, also providing guidance and support for fellow makers. The nature of the rewarding mechanisms will vary – it might not be possible to ensure a monetary reward due to budget constraints or administrative restrictions, especially during the first years (it’s better to start lean and grow when external support starts to provide some sort of stable income, beyond the original First Foundation contribution). But even voluntary work may be somehow credited by means of mechanisms such as the diploma supplement and even reference letters from Lab coordinators.

• By professors, who are expected to leverage the lab resources in order to introduce innovative projects/initiatives within course curricula. Thus, the Amazing Lab is expected to grow with people and with the Department. Besides student/department-led initiatives or course projects, contests and competitive events are also expected to build enough critical mass to start drawing the community around its orbit.

Key Questions:

How will this project inspire people into the future?
We want to foster a mindset of agency: that you can create the change you want to see, rather than becoming a victim of the circumstances, by supporting the creation of an empowering environment where good ideas are encouraged and rewarded.
Thus, engaging people is a key aspect to our strategy: specifically, we want to reach out to students and prospective students alike. Our aim is embodied by the motto see amazing in every student. This means two things: recognizing that everyone has potential while, at the same time, helping students discover by themselves what they can really become, with proper guidance from mentors, professors and even researchers. It’s all about building a participative hands-on collective, preparing people to work together towards building the future instead of being mere spectators, by showing them what they can do. And also to attract talent, by improving the Department’s image (added coolness factor points always matter).

The Amazing Lab will be the cornerstone for our SMART strategy:

The Amazing Lab must be, above everything else, an Amazing Place. We want to foster the progressive involvement of the community around a collective mission: to change for the better and help people overcome the fear of failure as much as the frustration of failing, two high ranking factors hampering creativity and learning (resilience comes from accepting that FAIL often means First Attempt at Learning). Despite the proposal’s name, teaching and research staff support will be crucial to achieve our objectives, as involvement with Lab activities will help recognize/identify talent, also providing resources to help enrich and diversify course curricula and pedagogical approaches

How will this project promote high standards and excellence?
Fix attitudes, motivate people and excellence will find its way.

We cannot aim at the future if we stick to a 19th century teaching and learning culture. The proponents believe that investment in favour of the modernization and promotion of good pedagogical practices can be one of the potentially differentiating aspects of a University as a school for advanced studies. This effort should not be limited to implementing quality management policies based on surveys and the adoption of supervisory methodologies that, despite their relevance, often have little more effect than providing evidence to reinforce a diagnosis that has long been known: traditional teaching methods often fail to motivate students.

Prior experience has shown that a purely theoretical approach to teaching the fundamental concepts of computer science, media-centric design and engineering has several shortcomings, contributing to distance the students and, in some extreme cases, fostering rejection towards certain topics. This is partly because the involved formal and theoretical aspects can be quite demanding, both in terms of subject diversity and difficulty, which change accordingly with the specific specializations. This is further true for first year BSc students, who often feel their expectations betrayed by the nature of the curricular structure.

At a time when online content abounds, it is up to professors to become concerned about motivation and differentiation, providing added value in comparison with the resources and contents that, despite being convenient, are often passive by nature. The Amazing Lab intends to become instrumental in changing attitudes, promoting a logic of complementarity/proximity between students, mentors, professors, and researchers.

Moreover, there has been an increasing prevalence of the so-called maturity deficit, often pointed out as one of the main causes of dropout, indiscipline, and failure among undergraduate students – this perception is reinforced by studies sidentifying a delay in the transition period from childhood to adulthood well into the 20s. From the professors’ standpoint, the consequences are perceived as a generalized instability at one or more levels of the students’ behaviour and/or personality, such as emotions, autonomy, attention/concentration capacity, diligence, and organization. However, the same students often have a very high potential for creativity, repressed by factors prior to entering the University, which may tend to worsen when they access higher education. We want to reach out to those students and change attitudes.

Overall, the Amazing Lab initiative won’t be a silver bullet, but we believe it can bring a significant contribution towards building a more cohesive community, changing attitudes, building students’ confidence and strengthening their motivation.

How will this project take people out of their comfort zone?
By acknowledging that learning is, by nature, a social process, mentors and professors must take advantage of the Amazing Lab to help students reach their goals, also reinforcing specific teaching strategies. For instance, out-of-band selective scaffolding procedures can be put in place, in order to make content accessible, while providing a quick route enabling students to become involved in hands on activities as quickly as possible.

The Amazing Lab has a hidden curriculum purpose: foster good pedagogical practices by providing professors with the means to deal with the most frequent imbalances or difficulties in student groups – as an example, introductory programming classes can benefit from the introduction of physical computing companions (such as robots or Arduinos) to teach the fundamentals of algorithmic thinking without solely relying on (more abstract) classic programming exercises, pretty much in line with best practices (as it is the case for MIT’s 6.01 course or Carnegie Mellon’s Robotics Academy).

Students must be encouraged to work with greater autonomy in terms of choosing project topics (project-driven learning should be encouraged), planning strategies and development methodologies, with the counterpart of a greater demand in terms of the quality of the result to be achieved. In this sense, out-of-band means outside the class space, saving precious time and placing responsibility in the students’ hands, as a trade-off for greater autonomy.

For the teaching staff, the Amazing Lab must provide the means to rethink curricular structures, suppressing many shortcomings and/or restrictions refraining professors from changing things. And this change doesn’t even need to be radical, but rather progressive: the Amazing Lab can be instrumental in evaluating specific pedagogical approaches before deciding upon their adoption, supporting a curricular development golden path. Natural peer pressure mechanisms may also play a role in convincing the more reluctant, once positive feedback starts arriving from students regarding courses that started taking advantage of available resources.

How will we promote giving back and growth feedback loops?
Turn receivers into givers, and givers into mentors

We want to set in motion a virtuous cycle. Trust and responsibility will provide fertile soil for creativity which, by its turn, must foster the desire to learn and do, better and more. The Amazing Lab should constitute a creative force multiplier, providing the means to help build trust and instill students’ confidence in their own skills, teaching them to fight fear, conformity, and indifference. To rescue their own creative selves from years of conventional schooling focused on reaching specific measurable assessment outcomes, like academic top-level athletes.

Also, mentorship is a solidary process by nature: the Amazing Lab will be a place for exploring, developing ideas, and planting the seeds of growth, always in a participative way. It is expected that, after some time, mentor team members will hand over the torch to a new generation of students, raised in the Amazing Lab spirit. The same can be said about the Department organizational culture: we do not wish to impose a radical mindset shift, opting instead to adopt a mild evangelist strategy. Drastic changes and cultural shocks often produce quick results, but they also pave the way to create bitter disagreement, rejection, and unrest. Thus, we believe that we must work towards building bridges: connecting people and promoting cooperation between different course subjects, research groups and specialization interests, by giving them all sorts of excuses and reasons to meet at a very special place: the Amazing Lab.

This is our challenge. To all of you.