Campus Technology Insider Podcast May 2022
Listen: How an Escape Room Is Building Students' Digital Skills at Northampton Community College
00:08
Rhea Kelly: Hello and welcome to the Campus Technology Insider podcast! I'm Rhea Kelly, editor in chief of Campus Technology, and your host.
Northampton Community College in Pennsylvania recently won an Instructional Technology Council award for excellence in e-learning, recognizing its Smart Apartment Learning Lab: a combination escape room and technology sandbox in which students can learn about the tech we take for granted in our everyday lives. Picture a homey space in which the walls literally have eyes — or rather cameras and other sensors, integrated into seemingly innocuous objects like picture frames, the refrigerator or even a robotic cat. For this episode of the podcast, I spoke with Beth Ritter-Guth, associate dean of online learning and educational technology at the college, to find out how the Learning Lab is engaging students, building digital literacy and providing valuable training in the job skills of the future. Here's our chat.
Hi Beth, welcome to the podcast.
Beth Ritter-Guth: Thank you so much for having me.
Kelly: So you recently won an award from the Instructional Technology Council for a project called the Smart Apartment Learning Lab. Could you describe what the Learning Lab is and what it's all about?
01:31
Ritter-Guth: Absolutely. So the Smart Apartment Learning Lab, the SALL, is located at the Fowler Family Center at Northampton Community College in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. Northampton has three campuses: one in the east side of Bethlehem, one on the south side of Bethlehem, the Fowler center, and then one in Monroe County. And the Smart Apartment is located down at Fowler, in the basement of an old Bethlehem Steel building. So it's a cool location. And when I started at Northampton, in 2019, I had come from a community college in New Jersey, where I had an innovation space. And I had always wanted to take innovative pieces and make an apartment, a living space, where students and the community could think about technology in the spaces where they live. So we have a lot of great technology that shares data wirelessly. What are the benefits? What are the risks? And how does that apply to everyday people? So I was very fortunate. When I came to Northampton in 2019, I said this when I was being interviewed that I had this dream of this space, and college funding, everybody knows this who's listening knows that you have to ask every year for capital funds. And in many institutions, sometimes you have to ask a few years in a row before you actually get funding for something like this, a big idea that's completely different than anything anybody's done before. So I figured, well, I'm brand new, I'll ask, they'll say no, and I'll just ask again next year, because I'll have been here a whole year and have convinced them how cool it would be. So I asked for this Smart Apartment, the space, the money to build it. And they approved it. And I was blown away, because then I had to do it and I was like, Wow, that's awesome. So Northampton really does honor its mission to, to share cutting-edge technology with its students in the community. And so we built the Smart Apartment. So it started with finding a space, which, we found a great space in Fowler, which we also have a crime scene apartment in the Fowler basement. And we also have a blood spatter splatter classroom down there. So this space, so Northampton is a) known for this kind of like innovation, and we also have space in the basement of this fantastic historical building for the people who live in Bethlehem.
04:05
Kelly: It sounds kind of like a ghoulish hotel.