Highlights of BYU Colleges

Family Home and Social Sciences

• A team of economics students studied four different Utah school districts — Alpine, Provo, Salt Lake City and Park City — to find out if air quality affects school attendance. They discovered that there was a correlation between bad air quality and lack of school attendance. They presented their research at the Fulton Conference.
• The BYU Museum of Peoples and Cultures acquired a collection of Pre-Columbian Peruvian textiles in 2014. Because the textiles were originally obtained by looters, BYU didn’t have any information about them. Anthropology student Taralea Foster studied the textiles under a microscope and discovered they were from Peru and woven by the people of the Chancay or Chimu cultures during 1,000-1,500 A.D.

Ira A. Fulton College of Engineering and Technology

David M. Kennedy Center for International Studies

• The Kennedy Center will host different music groups playing music from around the world from July 26 to Aug. 9. The performances will be held on the Kennedy Center East Lawn on July 26-29 at 11:30 a.m. and Aug. 9 at 12:30 p.m.

Marriott School of Management

• The Association of Information Systems ranked the Marriott School Department of Information Systems number 11 out of the top researchers in the world for their 16 published articles of research in the past three years.

David O. McKay School of Education

• Every year the Arts Reaching and Teaching in Schools Partnership (ARTS) hosts a two-day conference, Arts Express Conference, for educators. This year 450 educators from across the BYU-Public School Partnership attended and joined in activities that involved music, dancing, drums and much more as they learned classroom skills and teaching techniques.

College of Nursing

• A group of 10 nursing students sponsored a Sunday fireside for the inmates at the Timpanogos Women’s Facility at the Utah State Prison. This annual event involved BYU students, music, and messages of home and religion.

College of Physical and Mathematical Sciences

• BYU received the PhysTEC5+ Award, which is given to U.S. colleges who have five or more certified physics teachers graduates in a year. BYU turned out 17 certified physics teachers during the 2014-2015 school year, which is more than any other school in the U.S. Only eight other schools received this award this year.
• Computer science professors Michael Jones and Kevin Seppi created a new method of 3D printing that decreases the amount of skill necessary to design an object for 3D printing. This method uses clay to model the basic shape of the object around blocks that represent interactive buttons, knobs or sliders. The model is scanned into the computer and the computer recognizes each of the blocks as a certain type of button, ensuring there is the exact space needed for the real button in the finished product.

Campus News

• BYU Football’s countdown to kickoff began on July 15 as they dropped a scavenger hunt package in Alabama. The rest of the 50 states scavenger hunt will begin in the following days.29