Unfortunately it sounds like your chair is looking for some flashy toy to attract students (actually parents…) rather than something that would really help the students grow.
As far as I can tell, most cutting edge tech related to ID would be aimed at masters/PhD work as there is a huge learning curve and they are in active development. If anything, interest would come from professors that are interested and ready to push those boundaries.
In a related field, it seems like architecture is moving really rapidly right now and architecture faculties are leading a lot of the efforts design, CAD and manufacturing/building development and not necessarily engineering faculties. Things like parametric design, use of AI and optimization algorithms, additive building technologies, use of robots in large scale building (3D sheet metal bending, suspended concrete pours…). Lots of schools have classes where they get their students to play with these new technologies and implementing by get their hands dirty building physical pavilions. Architecture has a history of academia but it seems like lately they are hub for a lot of technological development that would have typically happened in engineering faculties. It seems like on the flip side, ID faculties are much more focused on craft and professional development and there are not many places like the MIT Media Lab that create a bridge between ID and other disciplines. Yet most of ID and the success stories of ID were in very interdisciplinary settings.
Back to your 10k$ burning a hole in your pocket, I’d agree with Sain. If your school doesn’t have one, a photography/videography studio would be great. Even better if who ever’s showing the students how to use rendering software shows them how to light and compose a shot with a camera. It’s way faster and intuitive to learn by moving lights and modifiers around than it is to move points around on a computer and waiting for things to clear up…
As others have mentioned getting students to build things physically is great but can get very expensive very fast. I studied mech eng but in my final year, we had a design class where among other design tasks we had to build a physical prototype. We could invoice the school a few hundred bucks in material and had full shop access, training and more importantly super skilled trades that worked the shop and were used to explaining and working out manufacturing problems with student. You get a very different appreciation for manufacturing limitations when you’re personally faced with them…