If you stopped by the Oshman Engineering Design Kitchen classroom on Friday, odds were you saw a flurry of activity, as students, faculty and staff bent their heads over the room’s tables, talking and working to put together a series of puzzles.

It was the kickoff of OEDK INNOVATE, a new program designed to foster communication and problem solving skills in a fun environment. Each week, a new challenge will be unveiled and 15 teams of three will have about 45-minutes to complete it. The winning team receives $300.

“This is a challenge for you to spread your creativity and design skills,” said Maria Oden, professor in the practice of engineering and director of the Oshman Engineering Design Kitchen. She said the concept for the weekly challenges began after she attended National Academies of Engineering’s Frontiers of Engineering Education conference, where she met a professor from St. Louis University who was hosting similar weekly events for the school’s students.

“We’ve taken this in our own direction,” she said. “And we’ve been working on it since last fall, and the team at the OEDK has really embraced it.”

Each of the upcoming challenges will be different, but the idea behind them is the same: put faculty, staff and students in teams to solve problems and help them improve their communication and collaborative abilities.

The first challenge involved putting together three different puzzles in a specific amount of time. For the first puzzle, teams were allowed to refer to the puzzle box for reference. On the second puzzle, they only had a minute to look at the picture and had to put it together from memory. The third puzzle was a 3-D cat. Team #15, with engineering students Melody Tan, Madeleine Crouch and Benhang Shi, won the $300 prize, completing all three puzzles in a combined time of 30 minutes and one second. 

“This isn’t what I expected when I signed up to take part,” said Shi. “I was thinking it would be more like other engineering design challenges.”

“We developed a different strategy for each puzzle,” said Crouch. “With the second one, we each memorized a quadrant of the puzzle before we had to put the picture away and then we worked on that individually before putting the whole thing together.”

“There was lots of great energy in the room,” said Oden. “That’s very gratifying to me. And I’m hoping a lot from this group come back for future challenges.”

Sentiment from several people in the classroom is that they will.

Registration for OEDK INNOVATE challenges takes place every Friday at 11:50 a.m., with challenges starting promptly at noon. Registration is limited to the first 45 people to sign up. All Rice students, staff and faculty are invited to participate.