UA visit a peek at life on campus

7th-graders from Elkins take tour

NWA Media/ANTHONY REYES 
Keagan Mount (center), a seventh-grader at Elkins Middle School, wants to answer a question Tuesday during a visit with the University of Arkansas engineering program at the Arkansas Union in Fayetteville. The students are part of UA Education Renewal Zone’s Adopt-A-Classroom project.
NWA Media/ANTHONY REYES Keagan Mount (center), a seventh-grader at Elkins Middle School, wants to answer a question Tuesday during a visit with the University of Arkansas engineering program at the Arkansas Union in Fayetteville. The students are part of UA Education Renewal Zone’s Adopt-A-Classroom project.

FAYETTEVILLE - Alessandra Guzman and Amber Burks, seventh-graders from Elkins Middle School, both 13, sat in plush red chairs inside Giffels Auditorium in Old Main on the University of Arkansas campus Tuesday morning, the same seats where university students take some arts and sciences classes.

They were among about 100 seventh-graders from Elkins on a day-long visit that gave them a chance to learn about the university.

“I didn’t think there would be so many majors,” Alessandra said.

“I didn’t know it looked so nice,” Amber said.

The district is just 15 miles from the Fayetteville campus, but many students in rural Elkins schools have not had a chance to be on a college campus,said Casey Prock, a 2007 UA graduate who teaches seventh-grade English at Elkins Middle School. Prock is one of 32 teachers in Northwest Arkansas schools who are paired with a faculty or staff member from UA through an Adopt-A-Class program.

The university began receiving an annual grant of $134,000 in July 2012 from the Arkansas Department of Education as one of six Educational Renewal Zone Partnership offices across the state, said Elizabeth Smith, director of the Northwest Arkansas office.

Educational Renewal Zones are a state initiative aimed at linking public schools with higher-education institutions and regional education service cooperatives, according to the department.

Smith created the Adopt-A-Class program in response to a request from superintendents to have more interaction with university staff members who have deep knowledge of their fields. The program began last spring with 11 pairs of kindergarten-12th-grade teachers and university faculty members.

This school year, Smith had requests from 75 teachers from Northwest Arkansas schools to participate and matched 32 with faculty members, she said. She hopes to recruit 50 professors, staff members or doctoral students to participate for the 2014-15 school year.

University faculty members visit their adopted classes once a month, and the professor and teacher work together on what will be taught, Smith said. Each pair also makes plans for the young students to visit the campus.

The program matched Prock with Ron Warren, an associate professor of communications who studies children and media.

Elkins students had just finished reading the classic man-versus-nature novel The Call of the Wild by Jack London when Warren visited in the fall. He showed students clips from the NBC reality show Get Out Alive with Bear Grylls and discussed with students howmovies and television borrow themes from literature, including from a book written in 1903.

The trip to the university campus gave students some ideas about what they could study, such as learning to develop video games, Warren said. Students might know of game developers who did not go to college, but for some of them, acquiring the technology and tools for game development might be difficult, he said. The university courses in gaming would provide them access, he said.

“We tried to look for things the kids might take an interest in,” Warren said. “They didn’t even know you could do this in college.”

Inside Giffels Auditorium, David Frederick, associate professor in classical studies, discussed video-game development and showed the Elkins seventh-graders part of a video game created by the university’s Tesseract Interactive Humanities and Game Design program.

Frederick’s research is in houses built in Pompeii, which led him to build 3-D models and then to get into game design, he said. He has developed an online course for university students on Greek and Roman mythology that combines lectures with video-game scenarios.

The game scenarios were developed through the work of students taking video-game development classes, he said.

Frederick and Keenan Cole, technical director for the Tesseract lab, showed students game characters that university students designed and the Unity game engine used to combine the work of student artists, voice actors, storytellers and programmers.

“We had students build everything,” Frederick said. “It opens up that whole industry as something they can do.”

One Elkins student told Cole he had been curious about how to get started in the video-gaming industry, Cole said.

Prock hopes the experiences have inspired the seventh-graders from Elkins to think of themselves as college students, she said.

“There are a lot who don’t even think that would even be an option,” she said.

Northwest Arkansas, Pages 9 on 04/23/2014

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