St. Cloud State University’s MN NICE – The Minnesota (State) Networked Immersive Collaborative Experience is one of seven pitches that earned almost $25,000 in grant funding at the Minnesota State Educational Innovations 2019 Shark Tank Open.
MN NICE will be a shared, collaborative virtual reality environment for classroom scale audiences. Students, presenters and other participants will be able to see each other and work together in a shared experience.
The initiative was pitched by an interdisciplinary trio made up of Mark Gill from the College of Science and Engineering, Scott Miller from the Department of Music, and Alan Srock from the Department of Atmospheric and Hydrological Sciences at the Shark Tank Open in April.
The Shark Tank Open is designed to fund innovation that shows great potential for improving teaching, learning and access for students across its 37 colleges and universities.
MN NICE was one of 12 innovative pitches aimed to address obstacles to student success by using existing technologies, resources or practices in innovative ways presented at the 2019 Shark Tank Open sponsored by Minnesota State Educational Innovations.
Also recognized at April’s Shark Tank Open were three St. Cloud State innovators who were awarded small seed funding including:
Kannan Sivaprakasam — $10,000 in funding for “Development of competency-based digital badges/Micro credentials system: A pilot project”. The project is to develop and implement digital badges to serve the unmet needs of learners in the Minnesota State system. The digital badges provide validation of skills and competencies and support learning that is actively in process.
Sivaprakasam is working on the project with his co-principle investigators Plamen Miltenoff, Gail Ruhland, Melanie Guentzel and Eugenia Paulus of North Hennepin Community College.
William Gorcica — More than $6,000 in funding for “Making the Digital Physical” a helping students transform their creative work designed on a computer into a three-dimensional form. The project is designed to give art students an entry-level experience with new technologies for 3D.
Amy Herbert Knopf — $10,000 for “SCSU Assistive Technology Lab”, which will bring together an interdisciplinary team to create a statewide Assistive Technology Lab at St. Cloud State that can be used to educate students, staff, faculty, community members and others about resources available to remove barriers people with disabilities face in education, employment and daily life.
Knopf is working on the project with co-principle investigators Kathryn Johnson, Andria Belisle, Sara Gracheck and Roseann Wolak.
