The faculty mentors of teams from Perimeter College at Georgia State University and Dallas College, which placed first and second, respectively, at the 2024 Community College Innovation Challenge (CCIC) had different approaches to the academic competition.
Janna K. Blum, associate professor of physical sciences at Perimeter College, was asked by students Shalom Ejiwunmi, Sophia Bereket, and Rakeb Tesfasselasie to be their mentor after they developed the basic idea for Gorginea Care, a self-administered Pap test.
The three women who won the 2024 CCIC learned about the competition from John J. Weber III, associate professor of mathematics. Since mentoring a Perimeter College team that was a CCIC finalist in 2016, Weber has distributed info on campus about the annual competition that the American Association of Community Colleges (AACC) offers in partnership with the National Science Foundation. Weber is part of the team that leads the Perimeter College Hub for Innovation and Entrepreneurship (PCHIE).
In 2024, PCHIE offered its first Perimeter College Innovation Challenge. It is modeled on CCIC and encourages students “to use their creativity, problem-solving skills, and entrepreneurial abilities to address pressing issues in their communities.” Interdisciplinary teams of Perimeter students began work on their projects in August and participated in PCHIE workshops and industry field trips during the fall while they prepared flyers and pitches for the competition held in November.
Teams’ written entries and 90-second video submissions for the 2025 Community College Innovation Challenge are due April 3 at 11:59 p.m. PDT. Check out a video on CCIC.
Among the accolades the Perimeter College team received after their CCIC victory was recognition at a PCHIE event.
“Part of this was that they’re using the catalyst from our success with the CCIC to try to build up this internal mission … so this type of project really fits nicely into Georgia State’s pillars, and so there’s been a lot more push to highlighting the opportunities in the world of innovation and entrepreneurship,” Blum said. (Georgia State’s strategic plan has four pillars: research and innovation, student success, college to careers, identity and placemaking.)
Blum said that at the CCIC Innovation Boot Camp in June she gained insights into starting a company and marketing products, but that it was the four-day workshop’s effect on the students that most impressed her.
“CCIC is one of the absolute highlights of my past 15 years in education – getting to participate in this program, getting to see the growth of the students and what they gained and how they’re motivated,” she said.
Hitting the ground running
Ejiwunmi had taken a chemistry course taught by Blum and had stayed in contact with her. Bereket and Tesfasselasie knew Blum only as the leader of the campus lab where science, technology, engineering and math majors visit to do homework and work on projects. Ejiwunmi had complained to Bereket and Tesfasselasie about the invasiveness of Pap smear tests, and it was in the lab that the three friends began developing the alternative test.
“The carrot of the innovation challenge got them excited to start to formalize what they were just thinking and talking about in the lab,” Blum said. “They started doing drawings and they started thinking about how they could 3D print it and different ideas. And, so that really was a very organic process.”
The three young women continue to apply the entrepreneurship lessons they learned at the CCIC’s Innovation Boot Camp. They have formed a limited liability company and applied for a patent.
During a joint interview, Bereket and Tesfasselasie described their team as very collaborative, willing to take advice, and happy to work together on their start-up company, albeit mostly remotely. Bereket is now a mechanical engineering major at Kennesaw State University, Tesfasselasie is an industrial engineering major at Georgia Institute of Technology, and Ejiwunmi is in a combined bachelor’s/master’s degree public health program at the University of Georgia.
Bereket and Tesfasselasie said they are very grateful to “Dr. Blum.” They mentioned her introduction to two gynecologists, who they interviewed as part of their research, and the subject-matter experts who suggested ways to improve their pitch as critical to their success. They also expressed appreciation for the encouragement they received from many of the people who attended the CCIC poster session in Washington, D.C. The coach of another team was so impressed he connected them with an economic development organization that continues to help them.
“CCIC gave us a voice and the confidence to say this out loud and to keep pushing this,” Tesfasselasie said. “And too, I think, it made us also see it’s not just the people around us; people who we never met before also can relate to us. So I definitely say it gave us confidence and a voice.”
Encouragement with extra credit
It was an AACC email announcing the 2024 CCIC that prompted L. Taylor Starr to check the competition’s website and then offer extra credit to her students for coming up with innovative solutions to real-world problems. Starr is the Texas A&M University Engineering Academy professor at Dallas College’s Brookhaven Campus, where she is also an adjunct engineering instructor.
“I have my rigorous curriculum that I have to teach anyway as part of the Texas A&M structure, but I do want to give my students opportunities to earn extra credit,” Starr said.
Texas A&M’s Engineering Academy is a transition program that the research university offers in partnership with several Texas community colleges. Students apply to the program while they are in high school. Those who are accepted may take up to two years of introductory engineering courses and general education courses at their local community college prior to transitioning to Texas A&M.
Mulling ideas
Starr’s students responded enthusiastically to CCIC. Eight teams of academy students prepared materials that Starr and several colleagues reviewed to select three to submit to the national competition. CCIC limits each community college to three team submissions per year.
Aside from earning extra credit, Starr thinks all her academy students who participated benefitted from spending time and effort on the question: “What’s an innovative idea that could be the solution to one of the world’s most prominent problems?”
Starr said the four finalist team members, whose Autonomous Monitoring for Blaze Emergency Response (AMBER) project won second place at the national CCIC, benefitted from the Innovation Boot Camp that she describes as providing “invaluable” coaching to the students, particularly about their pitch.
“You can’t put a price on how important that is for the student to learn that. And CCIC does a great job of taking super technical presentations – like the ones my students had – and turning it into a true entrepreneurial pitch that easily communicates the why, the when, the how of it and the social impact as a result of this innovation,” she said.
She noted that the academy curriculum includes lots of hands-on technical learning experiences, but that preparing a CCIC submission required the students to do research about a particular problem and possible solutions.
Building confidence
Learning about entrepreneurship and business practices during the boot camp sessions and hearing the subject-matter experts’ critiques during their pitch practices were enriching and, at times, difficult experiences.
But Starr said the students emerged from CCIC with more confidence.
“Which makes them, you know, kind of like a triple threat. I mean, they’ve done the research. They have the technical piece, and now they’re getting the business and entrepreneurial piece. And that stays with them. So now they’re better communicators. In all of their classes they’re better presenters,” she said.
Peter Hansen, one of the Dallas College finalists, considers the pitch practice session a turning point.
“We had our idea, but we were fumbling over it,” he said, explaining it was “a rough experience” to hear the subject-matter experts’ less-than-rosy assessments. But, he said, no one was mean and each criticism came with a suggestion for improving the pitch. The team responded to the coaches’ suggestions by revising their pitch and practicing it late into the night.
Sebastien Vongkaseum, another team member, said the presentation by a U.S. Patent Office staffer continues to influence the plan to patent their AMBER ideas. It “was definitely a big influencer in why we chose to pursue it afterward,” he said.
The other two team members were David Navarro and Anish Yakkanti. All four men on the team are now taking courses at Texas A&M’s College Station campus.
Starr pointed out that many people do not think of community college students conducting research and participating in academic challenges.
“But what’s so wonderful about CCIC, and what we were able to experience while we were there, is the push to have these students create now and innovate now, and not wait until they transfer or transition. They have what it takes to be successful on a national level – a nationally competitive level as freshmen, which these students were,” Starr said.
