By Danilynn Welniak/reporter
The Trinity River Campus Idea Store serves an incubator for visions and dreams, encouraging its visitors to forget the impossible, its project manager told North Texas humanities faculty Feb. 6.
Tasi Hines conducted a tour of the store while explaining the intentions and opportunities provided by the facility.
“This building is intentionally full of open space emphasizing the connectedness,” she said. “We intend to take away the retail aspect and make it education-centered.”
Formerly known as RadioShack’s Store One, The Idea Store welcomes visitors and students to Tarrant County College’s newest campus on the Trinity River. Hines mentioned that although it is under renovation, it is a building already brewing with innovation and ideas to make higher education more appealing.
The 7,000-square-foot, two-story building already has a skeleton composed of advanced technology. The entrance is a domed room made completely out of glass with multiple projectors that display videos inside the dome. Some of the amenities include a green-screen room, a completely open conference room in the center of the building, flat screen TVs everywhere and a 4-D theater room designed to blow wind, squirt water and create smells according to the film being viewed on the enormous screen.
Hines said exact details and room specification ideas are endless for this building that aims to draw in the community and students and prepare them for higher education.
Some of the ideas for the store, provided by TCC faculty members, included a career profiling service and assessment, a try-it-out career lab, green-room orientation avatars, information on what the city of Fort Worth has to offer and access to successful professionals currently in a student’s field of study.
“Life, especially with modern technology, is always changing and reaching out is becoming more and more difficult,” Hines said. “The Idea Store will be able to help students and spark education motivation.”
Nancy-Dru Flowers from the North Texas Community College Consortium could not curtail her excitement with this project.
“In a room full of people, we find the answers within ourselves,” she said. “And this is what we can’t wait to see come to life in The Idea Store.”
