Education & Outreach

An international research effort organized by the University of Colorado Boulder conducted the first multiple, unmanned aircraft interception of a telltale rush of cold air preceding a thunderstorm known as a “gust front” as it rolled across the Pawnee National Grassland in northeast Colorado on Aug. 14.

Nearly 800 incoming students at the University of Colorado Boulder will spend their first Saturday as college students helping others in the community during the “Buff Day of Service” on Aug. 23.

New students at the University of Colorado Boulder will be greeted with dozens of activities including a welcome convocation, a Folsom Field pep rally and a “Global Jam” international food and music fest during Week of Welcome beginning Aug. 21. The free events give new students a chance to get acquainted with each other, the campus and surrounding community before classes start on Aug. 25. The activities are scheduled in addition to orientation sessions that cover the details of class registration, policies and student services at each college.

A program designed at the University of Colorado Boulder to teach kids to code using video games is being introduced into New York City public schools as part of an initiative to give every student access to computer science education. Scalable Game Design is a program developed over two decades by CU-Boulder computer science Professor Alexander Repenning to spark an interest in coding among kids by allowing them to design and build their own video games. The idea behind the program, which uses drag-and-drop programming tools, is to combat the widely held notion that computer programming is hard and boring.

A new study led by Old Dominion University and the University of Colorado Boulder indicates sea levels likely will continue to rise in the tropical Pacific Ocean off the coasts of the Philippines and northeastern Australia as humans continue to alter the climate.

An international team led by the Kavli Institute for Cosmology at the University of Cambridge and involving the University of Colorado Boulder has a new tool to look for the oldest galaxies in the universe: 32 days of observing time with the Hubble Space Telescope.

The United States has been selected as one of five international hubs for Future Earth, an ambitious 10-year research initiative to address global environmental change solutions and actions. The U.S. hub will be headquartered in Colorado and managed jointly by Colorado State University and the University of Colorado Boulder.

Last week, the CU-Boulder School of Education hosted more than 750 scholars and graduate students from all over the world for the International Conference of the Learning Sciences (ICLS) . Chaired this year by professors Bill Penuel, Susan Jurow and Kevin O’Connor, the conference has been held biannually for more than 20 years in places such as Australia and the Netherlands as well as throughout the United States.

The Institute of Education Sciences at the U.S. Department of Education has awarded nearly $5 million to the University of Colorado Boulder, the Center for Education Policy Research at Harvard University and Northwestern University to create a new center that will study how educational leaders—including school district supervisors and principals—use research when making decisions and what can be done to make research findings more useful and relevant for those leaders.

A $1.5 million grant from the Environmental Protection Agency will help researchers at the University of Colorado Boulder and the National Center for Atmospheric Research measure pollution from residential cooking and better understand a problem that kills millions of women and children each year in the developing world.