Outreach

About 50 GCU employees loaded up four passenger vans and headed to the Arizona State Veteran Home on Wednesday for Salute Our Troops. It was where they played Texas Hold ‘Em with the veterans at the nursing care facility, joined in games of bean bag toss and sang in the military branch singalong. But more importantly, it was where they spent time visiting with some deserving military heroes.

“I wanted to pay it back,” GCU Enrollment supervisor Michael Rodriguez said at the GCU Volunteer Fair on Wednesday at the 27th Avenue office building as he signed up at the Big Brothers Big Sisters booth. Rodriguez himself was paired with a Big Brother when he was a kid. BBBS was just one of the 20 GCU-supported nonprofits employees were able to connect with at the fair, an event GCU Community Outreach Manager Debbie Accomazzo calls a “matchmaking opportunity.”

If you didn’t know what the Great Pacific Garbage Patch was, you did after attending the Canyon Inquiry Project Showcase of Learning, which featured more than 80 students from 10 high schools presenting their projects — everything from the garbage patch to Sylvia Plath, the ways people have protested through the years, the dark side of social media and school mass shootings in America, to name a few. The event was the culmination of the eight-month project, in which teachers came to the GCU campus to immerse themselves in inquiry learning.

Children’s Cancer Network and Fresh Start, two non-profits, had similar problems: They needed some kind of messaging app to help them be more efficient. Enter GCU’s first cohort of Java coding boot camp students, who built apps to help solve those problems. The students, who are in the final week of the immersive, 15-week course, presented their capstone projects recently.

Like Hulk, GCU smashed at the recent DC vs. Marvel night at the Arizona Science Center. The College of Science, Engineering and Technology’s Dr. Binaben Vanmali, Scott McCrea and Deborah Haralson, the speakers at the event, discussed everything from electromagnetic pulses to The Flash’s diet to how villain The Vulture couldn’t possibly fly in that suit of his.

Abriel Bentley, donning her new prosthetic leg Saturday, looked across the crowd at the eighth Run to Fight Children’s Cancer, where she spotted Larry Chloupek, another leg amputee who broke a Guinness World Record in the run’s 10K in 2017. Those are just two stories from event this weekend, which saw more than 2,200 registered runners and walkers helping to bring attention to pediatric cancer while also helping raise funds for Children’s Cancer Network and Phoenix Children’s Hospital.

Solving a crime doesn’t happen in the span of a one-hour “Bones” TV show. Nor do one or two investigators break a case wide open. Usually, it takes a whole team of investigators, from police crime scene investigators to forensic technicians, as the 1,500 high school students who attended the College of Science, Engineering and Technology’s Forensic Science Day found out on Tuesday. They heard speakers talk about forensic dentistry, got to create some blood spatter and watched the Phoenix Police Department’s K-9 Unit in action.

It was an unusually chilly morning in Chandler when students in GCU’s dance department stopped by Kyrene de la Paloma Elementary School to warm the amphitheater stage with a 20-minute, modern, kid-friendly dance. The stop was part of the department’s annual elementary school dance tour, which continues through March. The goal is to give students the opportunity to see dance and maybe be inspired to become dancers themselves.

About 300 GCU students and 50 volunteers from Habitat for Humanity converged on Garcia Elementary School for the semiannual Serve the City. Volunteers woke up early Saturday to paint exterior walls, shovel sand into playground areas and turn other areas into splashes of color.

From liquid nitrogen-made ice cream to 3D printing and a souped-up go-kart, Strategic Educational Alliance’s recent STEM Innovation Spotlight seemed to have the secret formula for fun — and for helping educators connect with each other and with STEM-friendly organizations.