Community College Innovation Challenge Is Opportunity for Students & Educators Who Mentor Them

ATE Impacts Blog: Posted by Madeline Patton on 2026-02-09 12:00:00

The first phase of the Community College Innovation Challenge (CCIC) is underway with community college students around the country considering how to use science, technology, engineering, or math (STEM) to solve real problems.

To participate in the CCIC, community college students must form two-to-four person teams that develop an innovative idea—no prototype is necessary, submit an essay and a 90-second video about their idea by April 3, and find a community college educator to serve as their mentor.

Students participating in the 2025 Community College Innovation Challenge head to Capitol Hill where they displayed information about their ideas and talked with congressional stakeholders during the STEM Innovation Student Poster Session.

The role of mentor is one that Ellen Hause, who organizes the CCIC for the American Association of Community Colleges (AACC) in partnership with the National Science Foundation (NSF), hopes more educators in the Advanced Technological Education (ATE) community will see as an opportunity to be seized.

“Mentoring a student team in the Community College Innovation Challenge is far more than supporting a competition—it is opening the door to a life-changing experience. Students develop confidence, communication, teamwork, and problem-solving skills that employers consistently demand, while applying their technical knowledge to real-world challenges.” Hause wrote in an email reply to questions for this article.

The CCIC is one of the initiatives funded by the Advancing STEM Technician Education & Innovation project grant from the ATE program. Hause is the principal investigator of that grant, which also supports mentoring, technical assistance, and professional development through MentorLinks, ATE Future Leaders Fellows, and the annual ATE Principal Investigators’ Conference. Hause is associate vice president for Academic & Student Affairs at AACC. 

All aspects of the CCIC are structured to help students develop their communication, teamwork, and entrepreneurial skills. Hause said the CCIC is based on NSF’s Innovation Corps program, which provided support to help NSF-funded researchers translate their lab work into the marketplace.

Mentors of past finalist teams praise the CCIC as an excellent experience for them too, particularly the four-day Innovation Boot Camp in Washington, D.C., that culminates the second phase of the competition for 12 teams selected as finalists.  

“One year we were in the initial round, but in many of the other years we were lucky enough to be able to go to Washington and it's been a fantastic experience for the three different mentors from our school who've been able to take students,” said P.J. Ricatto, a chemistry professor at Bergen Community College in New Jersey. He mentored the team that won the CCIC in 2025 for Pop-Up Hydroponic Farms Made from Recycled Materials project.

There is programming for the mentors during the boot camp, which is structured as a friendly competition where people learn from each other. Consequently, mentors gain “connections around the country and everybody is truly pulling for all the students to do well,” Ricatto said.

Ricatto, Nancy Woods, and LaTasha Starr are the three CCIC mentors featured in the webinar The  Community College Innovation Challenge – Why Your Students Should Apply? that can be accessed from the CCIC website.

Educators and students interested in learning more about the CCIC may also attend the CCIC Application Idea Vetting Session at 3 p.m. (Eastern) on February 19. A CCIC judge and former student participant will be among the panelists. Students will have the opportunity to receive informal feedback on their ideas and ask questions. To register, click here.

Mentors’ Perspectives on CCIC

Students listen to a judge’s feedback after delivering their pitch presentation at the 2025 Community College Innovation Challenge Boot Camp.

“I just love CCIC and I think it is a fantastic opportunity for students,” said Woods. She is a professor of physics and mathematics and honors director at Des Moines Area Community College in Iowa. She has mentored two finalist teams and hopes another team of her students qualifies as a finalist this year.

“One of my passions is offering opportunities to students so that they can step outside of the typical ... We did not win first, second, or third place, but it was a fantastic experience and we learned where the flaws were in what we had envisioned,” she said of the 2025 team’s smart phone app. The team members continue to work with a small business advisory agency to create a saleable product.

Woods expects them to be rich someday from their invention, but she describes them as already more confident because of the Innovation Boot Camp. “Two of the three that participated last year went to different competitions around the state of Iowa and they both were on winning teams,” she said, adding that CCIC participants “actually really learn valuable skills, valuable knowledge, valuable transformations of their own lives.”

At the Innovation Boot Camp students receive coaching to build their strategic communication and entrepreneurial skills. They practice those skills during the STEM Innovation Student Poster Session where they engage with STEM leaders and congressional stakeholders. Then at the end of the boot camp the students pitch their ideas to a panel of industry professionals who select the top three teams. Each member of the first place team receives $3,000, second place team members each receive $2,000, and third place team members each receive $1,000.

Starr, an engineering professor at Dallas College in Texas, thinks the CCIC has taught all of her students that “they don't have to wait until they get to university to then do big things.”

Since 2024 she has given her engineering students extra credit for preparing CCIC entries. The best three ideas that surface from among her students’ proposals have been entered in the CCIC. (Colleges may submit entries from up to three teams. However, only one team per college moves on to the finalist round.) In 2024 Dallas College won second place for its Autonomous Monitoring for Blaze Emergency Response (AMBER) project and in 2025 the Dallas College team won third place for its Alerts VIA Detection and Ranging (AVIADAR) project. 

“I really believe fundamentally that we are all innovative in some way, it just takes a professor, an honors director, and a professor in physics. It takes somebody to just pull it out. And the CCIC gives us a chance to do that. It gives us a chance to pull it out,” she said. 

A Bergen Community College student on the team that won the 2025 Community College Innovation Challenge receives a high five from a person on a competing team.

Starr acknowledges that mentoring a CCIC team takes a bit of time for meetings with students, emails, Zoom informational sessions, and some paperwork. “But if you’re really in the professorship to create the next generation of leaders and those change agents, this fits right along with that.”

Ricatto praised the CCIC’s excellent organization and minimal paperwork. “So professors out there, logistically it is not a nightmare,” he said, adding, “In terms of a testimonial to why you should do it, is all of us who’ve participated once keep coming back.” 

How Other Faculty Have Mentored CCIC Teams

Over the years, Community College Daily has featured other community college educators explaining how they have mentored CCIC Teams. 

General Chemistry Teaching Tool

For instance, Kenneth Henry of Coalinga College in California incorporates CCIC’s use of scientific methods to solve contemporary problems into his general chemistry course. Teams that Henry has mentored at the rural college have qualified as finalists in 2023, 2024, and 2025. 

“There are a lot of students that are pretty excited about STEM, but there aren’t a lot of opportunities for STEM in this area,” Henry said in an interview for Community College Daily. “It’s very rural, very agricultural base, and they don’t see the direct ties in terms of the industries that are there, although there are ties. But they’re not visualizing those ties.”

In recent years Coalinga has established resources—a Math, Engineering, and Science Achievement program, math center, and added tutors—that have reduced obstacles to success in chemistry. “I get them started pretty early thinking about the [CCIC] project, and I build a project into the curriculum itself,” he explained.  

Engineering Club Activity

Richard W. Henegar Jr., engineering lab manager at Virginia Western Community College (VWCC) used the CCIC as an activity for students in the college’s Appalachian Engineers Club.

“It was an awesome experience for all parties involved,” Henegar said in a Community College Daily article about the WVCC team’s experience as one of 12 finalists selected to attend the 2023 Innovation Boot Camp.

Henegar said he uses the competition as a “stepping stone” to show students that they can make a difference. “They can do big things,” Henegar said of community colleges students.

The opportunity to network with other innovators at the Innovation Boot Camp is another reason he encourages VWCC students to enter the CCIC.

“It was amazing just seeing all the other students that were there for the same purpose and seeing some of the ideas that they’re coming up with. It kind of gave me hope for the future—that there are young bright minds out there that are chasing, you know, making a difference and not a paycheck. That was big for me, and letting my students see that and mingle with that,” Henegar said.