College of Science, Engineering and Technology

Hundreds of high school students on more than 40 teams descended Friday and Saturday on GCU Arena to compete in the Arizona West Regional FIRST Robotics Competition, where they unleashed their robots on the field of play. Their mission in the space-themed competition: Fill their spaceships with valuable payload using, of course, their robots. One group volunteering at the event was GCU’s Thunderbots. Said Thunderbots advisor Ed Koeneman, who teaches electrical engineering technology, “It’s important for high school students to see that college kids are continuing on in this fun world of robotics.”

Learning and Living Communities are designed for GCU freshmen who prefer to share a residence hall room, suite or floor with students of similar academic interests. Along with the connections they make organically, there are organized activities in Juniper Hall, the building housing six LLC’s: Honors, Colangelo College of Business (CCOB), College of Science, Engineering and Technology (CSET), psychology from the College of Humanities and Social Sciences (CHSS), and nursing and athletic training through the College of Nursing and Health Care Professions (CONHCP). “It has a different feel,” Kayla Warren said of her freshman year in Juniper. “It is academically centered, where we were all in the same mindset.”

Since January, GCU students have been busy in the engineering labs building a scaled-down version of a Formula 1 vehicle, though even before cutting one tube of steel, they spent about eight months designing the vehicle on a program called Solidworks. “This is really, really exciting for the University and the engineering program,” said Dr. Kevin Williams, who teaches mechanical engineering and is the faculty adviser for the 30-plus-member GCU Formula SAE Team. “It is the first time ever we at GCU are going to have a Formula vehicle built for competition.” The first-year team will see how their vehicle fares when they head to Nebraska in June for the Formula SAE Collegiate Design Series competition, going up against 79 other teams.

It was a science Saturday for fourth- through eighth-graders, who spent their Saturday morning making oobleck — an odd substance that acts like a liquid and a solid — building simple motors powered by batteries, deciphering code and programming robots. The workshop was organized by GCU’s Robotics Club in collaboration with K-12 Educational Development. About two dozen Thunderbots volunteered to work with the young students and foster their appreciation of science, technology, engineering and math at the club’s STEM Bonanza.

The College of Science, Engineering and Technology and the Honors College joined forces in 2018 to present the first CSET Research Symposium and Honors College Showcase “so that the audience can get a feel for a broader scope of research that goes on at GCU,” said Professor of Biological Sciences Dr. Galyna Kufryk. This year’s event featured hundreds of students across disciplines presenting their work — everything from augmented reality projects to the impact of college weight gain, the implications of curcumin in Alzheimer’s disease and a humanitarian project to help homeless women.

The GCU Robotics Club overcame a lot of challenges in the 2018-19 competition season — challenges that haven’t slowed down the club one bit. The Thunderbots are gearing up for their STEM Bonanza workshop on Saturday for fourth- through eighth-graders. They’ll be making oobleck, a slime-type substance that somehow acts as a liquid and a solid, and they’ll be unraveling codes with wheel cyphers. The Thunderbots are also getting ready to volunteer at the big FIRST Robotics regional competition at GCU Arena April 5-6.

Washington High School senior Juan Ballez has watched his father struggle with mobility in his hand and, for years, wished there was a way he could help. Now, on the cusp of graduating, he thinks he knows a way — by becoming a biomedical engineer. His dream of helping people, like his father, came closer to fruition Tuesday at GCU, when he found out he was one of 43 students in the neighborhood surrounding GCU to receive the Students Inspiring Students scholarship. “It feels like a huge weight lifted off my shoulders,” said Juan after receiving the scholarship, which covers four years of tuition and books. “… I was determined. I was like, I can’t have my parents pay for it (college). I don’t want that burden on them.”

It was in 2017 when the Sports Medicine Club first volunteered for Run to Fight Children’s Cancer, offering to help with first aid. It also was the year spectator Perry Harris suffered a heart attack. He might not have survived if not for the quick thinking of Sports Medicine Club students and their advisors, and for nearby athletic trainers. Three years later and the University ran through its first Special Event Medical Emergency Exercise on Tuesday behind the GCU Innovation Center at the 27th Avenue complex. Ten departments trained for a medical emergency by running through a mock scenario. “A situation can occur at any time,” said Canyon Health and Wellness Clinic registered nurse Ian Youngblood, one of the mock scenario participants. Nurse practitioner Bethany Whitson added, “That’s why we do the drills.”

The College of Science, Engineering and Technology’s Forensic Science Department has done it again, this time with the addition of some new booths at Forensic Science Day on Tuesday. The forensic odontology booth showed the visiting high school students how to use bite marks to solve a crime, and there also were new fingerprinting and impression-evidence booths. The visitors also watched a live police dog demo, met with the Phoenix Police Department’s Special Assignment Unit and heard from guest speakers in the field.

Students have been training in the cyber field at the University’s 27th Avenue cyber range since 2017. But these days, the hands-on range, now dubbed GCU’s Cyber Center of Excellence, is being fully being operated by the University and Grand Canyon Education in association with their established partner, the Arizona Cyber Threat Response Alliance. Along with its new name, the facility is emphasizing GCU’s culture at the range and incorporating the University’s “Hackers with Halos” approach to the cyber world. The range will open its doors for an open house from 3-6 p.m. Tuesday, when the campus community can drop in and do a little wifi hacking, password cracking and other cybercrime-fighting activities.