Peek Inside St. Ed's Joseph & Helen Lowe Institute for Innovation

LAKEWOOD, OH — One phrase has been echoing repeatedly down the hallways of St. Edward High School this summer, "Don't let the perfect stand in the way of the good." It's become the rallying cry for students and teachers that want to pursue innovation and entrepreneurial spirit, and the words breath life into the revamped and expanded Joseph & Helen Lowe Institute for Innovation.

The 28,000-square foot facility resembles a mashup of a Silicon Valley-tech startup and a contemporary shop class on steroids: open spaces, walls covered in marker-written ideas, smart boards and TVs in each classroom, 3D printers, laser cutters, a wind tunnel, space for welding, and more. It's an incredible space, especially when considering it will be used almost exclusively by teenage boys.

Jim Kubacki, the president of St. Edward High, said he and his team studied similar Innovation spaces at Notre Dame, Georgetown, Vanderbilt, and Case Western. In many ways, the Lowe Institute is more akin to a collegiate engineering and entrepreneur complex than a high school one.

"The kids that will be the most successful, they'll need to create something new," Kubacki told Patch during an early tour of the new facility. He thinks students will need to utilize cross-disciplinary techniques to blend learning into something actionable and unique. The Lowe Institute will give students space to spitball ideas and then walk a concept from idea to actuality, he said.

Making Makers

The new facility will be led by Nick Kuhar, who will maintain his duties as co-lead of the St. Ed's Film Department. He believes strongly in letting students push the curriculum of any class to new frontiers. While speaking with Patch, Kuhar unfurled anecdote after anecdote about students using their personal knowledge of technology to advance what was being taught.

"Jim [Kubacki] is always saying he doesn't want film students, he wants filmmakers. He doesn't want history students, he wants historians," Kuhar said. "That permeates [St. Ed's] culture."

Kubacki and Kuhar both want students to be creative, sure, but they also want them to take that energy and put it toward actually making something. "Great creativity requires great discipline," Kubacki said. "Great writers have to write a lot, for example." By extension, great engineers need to be building a lot.

While walking the three floors of the Lowe Institute, students of different ages milled about, prepping the building for Saturday's ribbon-cutting. Other students took part in summer robotics programs and engineering labs. Aside from their baby-faces, the students looked like budding engineers and robotics experts — they were doing.

Some of the classrooms in Lowe are made of walls that are meant to be written on. Even the windows can be scribbled on with markers. "It's like an extension of your own brain," Kuhar said, while looking at a wall covered in notes on a Rube Goldberg machine.

Besides the labs and classrooms and 21st Century shop class areas, the Lowe Institute offers "ideation" spaces. That's a buzz wordy way of saying "places where students can hang out and spit ball." Those rooms are filled with chargers for cell phones and laptops, TVs, books on engineering and entrepreneurship (real, actual books...gasp!), and a variety of odd-looking, but undoubtedly comfy, chairs.

Kubacki said students won't be allowed to have food and drink in most of the areas, but assured readers that staff wouldn't be sticklers about that. The administration really wants students to want to hang out in the Lowe Institute.

By the looks of it, that won't be a problem.

(For more news like this, find your local Patch here. If you have an iPhone, click here to get the free Patch iPhone app; download the free Patch Android app here. And like Patch on Facebook!)

Photos from Rick Uldricks, Patch