Education & Outreach

<p>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.</p>

<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>

<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>

<p>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.</p>

<p>Last week, the CU-Boulder School of Education hosted more than 750 scholars and graduate students from all over the world for the <a href="http://www.isls.org/icls2014/">International Conference of the Learning Sciences (ICLS)</a>. 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.</p>

<p>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.</p>

<p>An antioxidant that targets specific cell structures—mitochondria—may be able to reverse some of the negative effects of aging on arteries, reducing the risk of heart disease, according to a new study by the University of Colorado Boulder.</p>
<p>When the research team gave old mice—the equivalent of 70- to 80-year-old humans—water containing an antioxidant known as MitoQ for four weeks, their arteries functioned as well as the arteries of mice with an equivalent human age of just 25 to 35 years.</p>

<p>Five University of Colorado Boulder graduate students or alumni have been offered Fulbright grants to pursue teaching, research and graduate studies abroad during the 2014-15 academic year.</p>
<p><span id="">One doctoral student’s proposed topic of study in Thailand is the use of ultraviolet light and LED (light-emitting diode) technology to remove pathogens from reusable wastewater. Another doctoral student plans to study media practices and products in Australia that shape a particular Aboriginal identity.</span></p>

<p>If you think Neanderthals were stupid and primitive, it’s time to think again.</p>
<p>The widely held notion that Neanderthals were dimwitted and that their inferior intelligence allowed them to be driven to extinction by the much brighter ancestors of modern humans is not supported by scientific evidence, according to a researcher at the University of Colorado Boulder.</p>

<p>The University of Colorado Boulder’s financial education program, CU Money Sense, will host Money Smart Week 2014 on April 21-24 to help celebrate National Financial Literacy Month.</p>