Course Description

Innovation Lab Course Description 2019-2020

The Innovations class is available for students in grades 9-12 to tinker, create, invent, design, produce, write, program, and engineer. Students who take this class will have the opportunity to work on their choice of projects without the pressure of grades, failure or time constraints. Students will develop projects of their own choosing based on their interests, research possible solutions, connect to outside professionals via social media, collaborate with peers and experts, and develop prototypes or products. Students who take this class will be given opportunities to explore a wide range of tools and supplies to help them develop their project or product.

This class is offered as a 1 semester 1/2 credit or 2 semester full credit, pass/fail class.

What is an Innovations Lab?


As student's prepare to enter the 21st century workforce, skills such as problem solving, critical thinking, collaboration, creativity, new media literacy and the ability to effectively communicate over a distance must be developed. With goals to effectively prepare students to be successful in the future workforce, in life, and contributing members of their communities, practice with these skills combined with prior knowledge from personal experiences is a must.


The Innovations Lab at Queensbury High School offers students opportunities to work on projects of their choosing without the pressure of grades, failure or time constraints. This creates self-motivated learners in the following ways:

  1. Creating critical thinkers and problem solvers: Critical thinking and problem solving are skills that must be developed through practice. In the innovation lab student learning is self guided: students must identify a problem that interests them and learn information out of a need to solve that problem as opposed to be supplied with information and being told to learn it. Discovery learning is often cross curricular connecting math, science, technology, history, ELA and the arts and utilizes technology such as the internet and Web2.0 tools. The retention rate of discovery learning often increases because students apply the learned knowledge from all subjects to a practical problem that they are trying to solve as it impacts their life directly.
  2. Finding true creativity: If you told a potential employer that you could re-invent one of their products, process or spaces in a way that would improve performance and increase profits would you get the job? The answer is of course you would get the job. However, breaking paradigms is not easy. Sometimes we may get a "light bulb" moment where things just come together. More often, the outcome when trying to solve a problem and be creative is an idea that partly works or ends in failure. Albert Einstein once said " I have not failed, I've just found 10,000 way that wont work." In the Innovation Lab failure is still a success because we just learned one outcome that won't work. Next step, why doesn't it work and how can we make it different.
  3. Collaboration can be difficult: Adults and students alike will tell you that often the hardest part of their job is working with their colleagues or peers when they don't get to pick who's on the team. Why is this so difficult and why is it hard to collaborate with others? If your job evaluation or your school grade did not matter when working on a collaboration project would it be as difficult to work within a group? People are concerned with project outcomes when it directly effects there personal performance and how they are perceived by both their peers and administration. The point of collaborating is to increase performance and outcomes by sharing the work load and developing ideas with your team members using each other as resources. Becoming actively involved in a collaboration project allows you to work on two skills: (1) When you collaborate, you cannot delegate, (2) Authority stifles innovation. In the Innovation lab everyone has something to add and it is up to the group to utilize each member in a way to increase productivity and expand on ideas.
  4. Connected Learning: Over the past 50 years the classroom has transformed or "flipped" in many ways. Traditionally, the classroom teacher has always been considered the expert. Today, with the integration of technology into the classroom setting, social media allows students to connect with experts in specialized fields. The Innovation Lab encourages students to seek out information and answers to their design problems from experts in a related field using social media.