“I think there’s something uniquely empowering about having people believe in your dreams, perhaps even moreso when that belief is in your work,” said University of Central Arkansas fine arts student and Windgate Foundation Scholar Louise Mandumbwa. “It validates the part of you that believes you just might have something worthwhile to offer the world.”

With numerous television cameras rolling, Mandumbwa spoke before a standing room-only crowd gathered in McCastlain Hall on Jan. 22. Just moments earlier, students, alumni, donors and others listened with rapt attention as President Houston Davis announced the largest gift BTĚěĚĂhas received in its 111 years — a $20 million challenge gift from the Windgate Foundation.

As two of UCA’s Windgate Scholars, Mandumbwa, an international senior from Botswana, Africa, and Grayson Ruple, a senior from Bryant, were invited to address the audience and underscore the impact of Windgate’s generous support.

It was a historic moment that will forever be celebrated, the announcement that catapulted BTĚěĚĂto the next level of giving and serving students.

“There are moments that come in the life of an organization, that change its trajectory, that propel it to new thresholds of possibility, to new realms of impact and to new levels of service,” Davis said during the announcement. “A transformative gift such as this one does indeed become transformational for the university.”

“This [gift] raises the baseline for UCA. It puts us in a different league,” said Kale Gober ’09, vice president for University Advancement and president of the BTĚěĚĂFoundation. “This lead gift, during the initial phase of our comprehensive capital campaign, signals to all that now is the time to invest in UCA.”

A total of $19 million of the gift will support the new state-of-the-art Windgate Center for Fine and Performing Arts. The remainder of the project will be funded through additional private gifts and other resources, for a total estimated cost of $45 million. The final $1 million from Windgate will be added to the current Windgate Scholarship Fund, which helps students like Mandumbwa and Ruple pursue their arts degrees. The fund was established within the BTĚěĚĂFoundation in 2005, and since that time, 30 students have been awarded a total of more than $400,000.

The need for this new facility is great. Today, more than 250 students major or minor in art, and another 750 major in the other fine arts and communication areas. Student enrollment for all departments has remained at capacity for the past decade.

“This gift will allow us to fulfill the facilities and scholarship needs that are worthy of our outstanding faculty and students. We will be able to help more students earn degrees in art and related disciplines while also graduating a workforce of creative problem solvers, critical thinkers and independent learners. We thank Windgate Foundation for their partnership and incredible show of confidence in UCA’s vision for the arts,” Davis said.

As of press time, plans for the world-class facility include a gathering lobby with art exhibition space; a 175-seat black box theater and experimental lab; a scene shop; a 450-seat concert hall designed for orchestra, choir, band and ensemble performances; a rehearsal/recital hall; a percussion studio; and several other music studios and practice rooms. The facility will add much-needed class, studio, rehearsal and design space, which will increase program capacity. It will also foster interdisciplinary collaboration between the visual arts, theatre and music.

“The Windgate Center for Fine and Performing Arts is going to have a ripple effect that will last down through the generations,” said Terry Wright, dean of the College of Fine Arts and Communication. “Fifty years from now, that building is going to have a history of affecting thousands of students, faculty members and community members.”

“With this new facility, our students will be at the front and cutting edge of what’s possible in the arts,” said Patricia Poulter, provost and executive vice president. “They’ll be prepared to go out and change the communities in which they engage.”

The Little Rock-based Windgate Foundation is a private grant-making foundation established by an Arkansas family in 1993. Its principal goals include funding significant educational programs in contemporary craft and visual arts, and in art history preservation efforts, as well as providing funding to K-12 and higher educational institutions to develop and support the arts, scholarships and effective instructional programs. To date, the Windgate Foundation has provided more than $751 million in grants in these areas.

“Windgate Foundation has supported visual arts, contemporary craft and art education programs in the United States for 25 years,” said Patricia Forgy, executive director of the Windgate Foundation. “For almost 20 years, we have proudly partnered with BTĚěĚĂand are delighted to continue our support for their new Fine and Performing Arts Center. The faculty and administration are supportive and enthusiastic, and we know this improved facility will be a great benefit for the students.”

BTĚěĚĂhas been invested in the arts since its early days. In fact, the Department of Art was one of the original eight departments when BTĚěĚĂwas established in 1907. Over the years, the university has celebrated many strategic accomplishments in the arts, including: founding the Arkansas Shakespeare Theatre, which is the only professional Shakespeare repertory company in the state; progressing toward All-Steinway school status; and offering acclaimed courses and terminal graduate programs one can only find at UCA.

The Windgate Center for Fine and Performing Arts will be situated at the corner of Donaghey Avenue and Bruce Street and will serve as a cornerstone of the campus that encourages participation in the arts and provides a unique experience for students, faculty and visitors. The facility is expected to be completed in the fall of 2022.

“This new project is much more than a building,” said Davis. “It is a necessary and pivotal step in our ongoing efforts to transform lives and make an impact in Arkansas and beyond.”

Arkansas State Normal School, now the University of Central Arkansas, was created in 1907 as Arkansas’s first teachers college. The purpose of the institution was to properly train teachers and transform Arkansas classrooms, creating a legacy that has spanned more than 100 years.

“BTĚěĚĂstarted off as a teachers college,” said Michael Mills, chair of the Department of Teaching and Learning. “That’s our heritage. That’s our legacy. We innovated where there was no innovation. BTĚěĚĂhas a legacy of transformation.”

This tradition was exemplified when the university’s College of Education was notified of its selection as an Apple Distinguished School for 2018-21, a three-year designation given to institutions for continuous innovation in learning, teaching and the school environment.

UCA’s College of Education is the only one in Arkansas with the Apple Distinguished School designation.

“We are not just on the cutting edge of education, we are cutting that path,” said Victoria Groves-Scott, dean of the College of Education. “We are doing things that other universities are not doing within their colleges of education.”

The College of Education learned of the distinction in October 2018. The college received the designation, in part, due to its iPadÂŽ Mobile Technology Initiative.

During the 2015-16 year, college faculty and administrators began to assess and develop ways to increase the use of technology in the collegiate classroom. They spent a year planning, learning and building a program. Faculty attended full-day retreats and underwent at least 100 workshops to learn strategies for using the iPad in the classroom.

The tremendous amount of work in about a year speaks to the quality of faculty in the College of Education, Groves-Scott said. At the end of this planning period, faculty involved in this process received an iPad. The college also purchased three iPad carts to house in the college, as well as designated apps to share with all faculty and students.

In fall 2016, the College of Education added iPads as a curriculum requirement, stipulating that students enrolled in the elementary, special education and middle-level programs were required to have an iPad. Some secondary education programs also chose to participate.

Each faculty member was paired with a technology coach, and faculty continued professional development sessions after the launch of the initiative. Local K-12 educators were invited to attend some of the learning sessions whenever possible.

Faculty created textbooks and other Open Educational Resources with the goal of creating overall cost savings for students, Groves-Scott said.

“They take tests for licensure that are $300 each. They have to pay for background checks,” she said. “Some are driving to Little Rock for student teaching. If we can create textbooks they don’t have to buy, that helps a lot.”

Mills said he often tells students, “I’m not teaching you to just get a job. I’m not teaching you to slide into the status quo. I am teaching you to bust the status quo. I am teaching you to transform the environment where you end up.”

Jordan Painter is a middle-level education major and graduates in May. The Heber Springs native was skeptical of the mobile initiative primarily because of the cost of the device. The ability to quickly take and organize notes that could be viewed for years to come changed her opinion.

“That realization justified every dollar in my mind,” Painter said. “I probably became the number one fan of Apple Pencil® and iPad Pro® [devices.]”

Students learned how to use the devices and several applications such as SeeSaw, Nearpod, AdobeÂŽ Spark and Explain Everything.

Laurie Nick ’18 began teaching eighth-grade physical science in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, after graduating. Through her education and training with the iPad Mobile Technology Initiative, Nick learned how to control robotic balls by using the Sphero Edu, fusing robotics and technology to fuel student imagination.

“I learned how to operate Sphero using an iPad,” she said. “Through the use of Sphero, my students were excited and curious to learn about energy transfers and transformations. It was evident that my students mastered the learning goals I had set for them through the use of this technology.”

As technology is increasingly used in careers from farming to heating and plumbing, Groves-Scott said she expects a pivotal moment in K-12 education.

“If we want to prepare the next generation for college and the workforce, we’ve got to start in the classroom,” she said. “It’s really an investment in our future.”

With new technology, and a new degree program to boot, the University of Central Arkansas is now a resource for cyberdefense training.

Thanks to a $500,000 grant from the Arkansas Department of Higher Education, BTĚěĚĂhouses a fully functional cyber range, the first to launch at an Arkansas institution for educational training purposes.

“A cyber range is a sandboxed environment that allows students to learn how to practice cybersecurity in such a way that they can work with viruses, work with system attacks, but [be] completely walled off from the external internet,” said Stephen Addison, dean of the College of Natural Sciences and Mathematics.

Because UCA’s range is an emulator, students experience real cyberattacks rather than simulations. Cyberattacks can include denial of service, phishing, viruses, identity theft and more. Many people are unaware of just how vulnerable their digital information is, Addison said.

What came first wasn’t the idea for a cyber range, though; it was instead the mission to implement a degree program in cybersecurity. Such a degree would set BTĚěĚĂapart from other programs while also preparing students for the demand of cyberdefenders in the workforce, Addison said.

BTĚěĚĂwas approved to begin a Bachelor of Science in cybersecurity program in July 2018 and began courses for it the very next month. The program went from having five students its first semester to more than 30 enrolled in the spring.

With a degree in cybersecurity, students can go on to work in fields like banking, business and health care.

“Our graduates are prepared for the industry: Once they’ve graduated, they’ve already practiced cybersecurity,” said Ahmad Alsharif, instructor.

As the first faculty member to instruct in the degree program, Alsharif teaches the introduction to cybersecurity course. He’ll cover the introduction to number theory and cryptography course, as well as computer forensics, in the future, too.

Alsharif said the existence of the range is key for the program because it allows students to confront real-world scenarios.

“In order for students to practice cybersecurity, they need some kind of practice different from theoretical study,” he said. “The cyber range provides an emulation platform through which students can practice cyberdefense. First they learn how to attack, and if you learn how to attack, you can learn how to defend.”

The implementation of the degree program and the range even inspired some students to change majors. Junior Dylan Diamond, one of the first students in the program, considered pursuing physics and computer science. After learning about the new program — and after discussing the importance of cybersecurity with a relative in the IT field — he switched paths.

“Being in the class for the first time, it was eye-opening,” said Diamond, who is also majoring in applied mathematics. “It was really big on awareness on how insecure a lot of things are and how there’s a lot of, shall I say, conveniences that we take where we cut security for the sake of expedience. It was really amazing to me to be one of the first in the class.”

The cybersecurity industry isn’t limited to only those with science and math backgrounds, Addison said.

“There’s demand for liberal arts graduates. There’s demand for business graduates,” he said. “So one of the things I wanted to do from the onset was to have a collaborative program between [the colleges of Liberal Arts, Business, and Natural Sciences and Mathematics], which is what we have. There are ethics courses; there are business courses, as well as science courses.”

Outside of campus, BTĚěĚĂis working with K-12 schools on developing curriculum related to information security, and it’s also partnering with two-year institutions on creating cybersecurity degree offerings that are compatible with UCA’s requirements for a bachelor’s.

“We didn’t propose a range for BTĚěĚĂonly,” Addison said. “We proposed a range that all universities in the state can make use of.”

Addison forecasts that more than 100 students will enroll as cybersecurity majors in the second year of operation, leading to even more growth in the future.

“Becoming a bigger program, we can get more resources, we can improve our cyber range, we can get new technologies,” Alsharif said. “As we get bigger and bigger, we can improve what we are providing for our students.”

A concert hall, park, stadium or other venues are usual places for a musical performance, but at the University of Central Arkansas, a concert could also be held underwater.

The university presented a multipart series of events aimed at bringing attention to the importance of water and water conservation. The signature event, “The Water About Us,” included an underwater concert.

“We always try to showcase how the arts can be tools for social change,” said Gayle Seymour, associate dean of the College of Fine Arts and Communication. “The art has to resonate and be memorable. We’re trying to inspire action.”

Named “Aqurld Waves at the Water About Us,” the concert was performed three times on both Oct. 4 and 6 at the HPER Center pool on the university campus. HEARding Cats Collective, a nonprofit music education organization based in St. Louis, and BTĚěĚĂpercussion professor Blake Tyson performed the music while playing instruments made specifically for use underwater.

Middle education major Savannah Raup was curious about what to expect at the concert.

“We are really big theater people, and we just love performances, and this is really interesting,” Raup said. “I thought it was a very well-rounded piece. It was almost like all of your senses were heightened.”

Visitors could watch poolside screens for video of the movement artists, CORE Performance Co., as they danced in and out of the water.

Raup watched from poolside seating, but attendees could also watch from a second-floor viewing area or go into the pool with the performers.

“When you dip your head underwater, you hear different things than whenever your head is outside the water,” said Beth Wilson Norwood ’09, former BTĚěĚĂart instructor. “It’s just really neat because you get a totally different experience.”

She initially wanted to sit poolside but later changed her mind.

“When you float on your back when you’re in the water and you hear your breath, so that becomes a part of the experience,” Norwood said. “It was a whole body experience.”

Denise Pearson attended with family to support her grandson who is part of the young adult group with Community Connections, a nonprofit organization that provides extracurricular activities for children with special needs and support for their families.

“I thought it was a very unique experience. I really enjoyed seeing all the different kinds of art come together. The sound and the music and the sights and the water — it was very, very interesting,” Pearson said.

Sophomore Jamie Lockwood is an entrepreneurship and innovation major with a minor in percussion performance. He had a special interest in the performances.

“It was really cool to watch how they were able to manipulate how the vibrations work in ways that you normally wouldn’t be able to with normal instruments outside of water,” Lockwood said.

“The Water About Us” was funded by a grant from Mid-America Arts Alliance (Regional Touring Program), an agency of the National Endowment for the Arts serving Arkansas, Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska, Oklahoma and Texas. Additional funding was provided by a grant from the Arkansas Arts Council (Collaborative Support Program), an agency of the Department of Arkansas Heritage and the National Endowment for the Arts, and by BTĚěĚĂthrough Reynolds Performance Hall, Sponsored Programs and the College of Fine Arts and Communication arts fee.

In six months or less, a program at the University of Central Arkansas can take those with novice computer skills and train them to be entry-level software developers.

, housed in UCA’s Division of Outreach and Community Engagement, opened in August 2016 as a way to address the shortage of software developers in the state.

Since its inception, ArCA has graduated more than 80 students. To better help the program’s growth, ArCA left the Brewer-Hegeman Conference Center space it once used and opened a new campus in August 2018. The new campus on South Donaghey Avenue includes private study spaces, two classrooms and a kitchen.

As technology becomes more integrated in various industries, many look to ArCA as a way to gain a competitive advantage, said Mary Condit ’14, former director. There are no prerequisites to enroll other than having basic computer skills. What matters most, Condit said, is that enrollees have a genuine curiosity for software development.

“We do a lot to change people’s lives, to take their career trajectory and quality of life and raise that for them in a really short amount of time,” Condit said.

ArCA offers two routes: a three-month program, designed for those who are able to attend class from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., and a six-month track that offers courses three nights a week from 6-8:30 p.m.

In class, students learn Java, a programming language, and also study SQL, HTML and CSS through interactive lectures that involve coding alongside the instructor, who is seasoned in the industry. Lectures are followed by lab time, during which students typically repair code independently.

Prior to enrolling, Sabrina Runge ’15, ’17 knew little about coding. Through ArCA, Runge was able to land a job as a senior analyst at Merkle in Little Rock, where she assists with the technical side of email marketing.

“Coding is important because technology is definitely one of the biggest growing industries and, just looking forward into the future, it’s a skill to have that will always be useful,” said Runge, who earned her certificate of proficiency from ArCA in October 2018.

Along with Merkle, ArCA students have gone on to work for companies like Acxiom, J.B. Hunt and numerous others in central and northwest Arkansas.

“What we have here [in Arkansas] to me is an exceptional quality of life and low cost of living and great salaries for software developers that I don’t think will do anything but rise,” Condit said.

ArCA’s student body is largely nontraditional. Most enrollees are in their late 20s to mid-40s and are seeking a career change.

Amanda Chandler ’15 was a teacher for eight years before enrolling in ArCA last year. In January, she began working as a business analyst at Merkle, which requires her to work closely with SQL.

“It’s something I’ve seen before and I’ve worked with in class,” Chandler said of SQL. “Whenever they showed me that, if I’d never gone to the school, I might’ve been overwhelmed.”

Students’ capstone projects, which are typically based on a hobby or past job, are presented at ArCA’s Demo Day, a time for students to demonstrate their work to potential employers and build networking skills.

For his final project, Thomas Montgomery ’09, who finished ArCA in fall 2017, created a database that stores information on one’s comic book collection. Montgomery now works as a delivery analyst at Acxiom in Conway.

“What made it even more so enticing was the excitement of the staff at the Arkansas Coding Academy, not just the instructors but also the director,” said Montgomery, who enrolled after feeling unfulfilled in the film industry. “They were always so excited. Their excitement for what they were teaching you was really infectious. It really got you into it.”

ArCA also offers coding classes for children and teens, and it partners with Philander Smith College to provide coding training in Little Rock.

Graduates say they encourage anyone who is interested to give ArCA a try.

“It really has changed my life around for the better,” Montgomery said. “I can’t recommend it enough.”

When Patricia “Patty” Poulter began her role as provost and executive vice president at the University of Central Arkansas in July 2018, she immediately felt at home in Arkansas.

“My family has been here for seven generations,” she said. “I have experienced a connection to this place that I could never have anticipated, and that is probably due to my family.”

Poulter’s family tree is rooted in Walnut Ridge, where her father was raised. During her childhood, Poulter and her family would travel from their Illinois home to Arkansas for holidays and vacations.

During the first months of her tenure at UCA, Poulter represented BTĚěĚĂat the presidential investiture at Williams Baptist College in Walnut Ridge. While there, she took time to make a special stop.

“I visited my grandparents’ grave. I put my BTĚěĚĂpin on my grandma’s grave,” Poulter said.

For her, the pin symbolized how education can change the trajectory of a person’s life. As a first-generation college graduate, Poulter recognized UCA’s reputation for serving first-generation students and helping them succeed. This is one of the factors that drew her to UCA.

“The mission, the size of the university, the focus on student success, on helping people become more of their family’s destiny, on allowing the innovative work being done by faculty, and the diversity in the colleges and the degrees offered, it resonated with me,” she said.

She came to BTĚěĚĂfrom Kennesaw State University, where she served as dean of the College of the Arts. Before that role, she worked at Eastern Illinois University as associate dean of the College of Arts and Humanities, interim chair of the journalism department and chair of the Department of Student Teaching and Clinical Experiences.

As provost, Poulter serves as the chief academic officer for the campus. She oversees UCA’s six academic colleges, the Graduate School, the Norbert O. Schedler Honors College and other academic departments. She plans to support and expand the university’s efforts in areas such as research, partnerships with two-year institutions and student success strategies. At the Laurels & Stripes event hosted by BTĚěĚĂin March, Poulter established the Lloyd and Vivian Gaines Scholarship with a gift of $25,000 in honor of her family.

“We are a best practice in student success,” Poulter said. “In general, I am excited about focusing our efforts on helping students to persist and to succeed. We are coordinating those in ways that are game changers for our students.”

She received a bachelor’s in music education and master’s in conducting from Eastern Illinois University. She earned her doctorate in music from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Her style of leadership is based, in part, on problem solving, listening, assessing, planning, building trust and collaborating, Poulter said, as well as empowering those around her to be successful.

“Frankly, innovation happens when people can communicate and collaborate and find ways to share resources,” she said.

Poulter is the first female provost for the university, a fact she said she did not notice immediately because another woman already worked at the executive staff level, Diane Newton, vice president of the Division of Finance and Administration.

“Seeing her at the table in executive staff meetings and seeing people of different ages, seeing people of color and seeing a woman, I thought it just seemed perfectly normal,” Poulter said.

She has also recognized a “strong and positive, organic, groundswell here at BTĚěĚĂin women’s leadership,” to which Poulter said she is dedicated to helping foster.

“I am thankful for the strong women who have gone before me,” she said. “I am thankful for the strong men and women with whom I work who are open about inviting people to the table.”

Before graduating from the University of Central Arkansas, many students in the School of Nursing will have witnessed a birth, checked vital signs on newborns and practiced other clinical skills — on manikins, that is.

Supported by a $500,000 gift from the Nabholz Charitable Foundation — the philanthropic arm of construction company Nabholz Corp. — the university opened the new Nabholz Center for Healthcare Simulation and unveiled upgrades to its existing skills lab wing in the Doyne Health Sciences Building in August 2016. Other support of this project included the Blankenship family gift of $215,500, Sen. Jason Rapert’s grant of $100,000 given through the General Improvement Fund, Conway Regional Health System and many others.

The center and skills lab include rooms designed to simulate clinical settings and strengthen communication, teamwork, critical thinking and ethical skills among students. During a simulation, up to about four students enter a simulation room while others observe from an audio-visual-equipped debriefing room.

Students may use simulation manikins — many of which can simulate breathing, heart sounds and convulsions — to observe births, check vital signs, practice bathing and more. Manikins are operated from a separate control room.

“It really gets them to think and to be able to apply what they already know. They walk away realizing they knew more than what they thought,” said Jacob Baker, ’04, ’07, simulation center manager and clinical instructor. “We expect them to make mistakes, but they make them here. They won’t make them out in the real world, in the clinical setting, which is what we want.”

Nearly 300 students and faculty members in the college experienced a simulation in the center during the fall 2018 semester. The program even once had 45 students experience simulation scenarios in one day.

“Without the technology, it wouldn’t have been as effective or efficient to do that,” Baker said. “We had two rooms going at the same time, and we were able to take care of it all for them. Technology plays a huge role.”

With the center’s technology, simulations can even be taken on the road. A portable sim-view allows simulations in the center to be shown live in other areas on campus, such as the Student Center.

Senior Maria Shipp has experienced simulations on campus since her first year of nursing school. She prefers obstetrics simulations, as that is the field she would like to enter.

“There are some manikins where you can listen, and they’re actually breathing and actually have a heartbeat, so that’s very beneficial because you can listen to the different things,” she said. “You can change the settings. So based off that interpretation, you can change how you’re going to care for that patient.”

The simulation space also better allows for interprofessional education trainings to take place, which means students across various disciplines — such as psychology, occupational therapy, physical therapy, speech therapy and nutrition — can work together during a specific simulation scenario.

“It’s basically putting into perspective: It’s not just the nurse,” Shipp said. “It’s other fields that you need to collaborate with and work with in order to make sure your patient gets the full benefits and care for them. It’s not just us; it’s others.”

Baker said the effect medical professionals have on patients is tremendous and that patients, in turn, impact clinical staff, too. The existence of the simulation space, he said, raises the students’ comfort level toward working in clinical settings.

“I love what I do. The faculty here has a passion for these students that, I believe, is unmatched,” he said. “We want to see the students succeed, and we want to see them get through and be successful.”

As approaches to surgery continue to grow, one University of Central Arkansas professor has been developing tools to contribute to technology-based advancements.

Tansel Halic, associate professor of computer science, and a team of student researchers have developed two pieces of technology to assist with surgical trainings. The Virtual Arthroscopic Tear Diagnosis and Evaluation Platform (VATDEP) is a simulation model designed to train surgeons for rotator cuff surgery, and the Virtual Fundamentals Arthroscopic Skill Trainer (VFAST) is programmed to help build surgical skills.

Arthroscopy is a minimally invasive operation on a joint using a flexible fiber-optic camera called an arthroscope.

In 2018, Halic’s VFAST project was awarded a $297,027 Arkansas IDeA Networks of Biomedical Research Excellence (INBRE) Research Development grant, which is funded from the National Institute of General Medical Sciences grant under the Institutional Development Award Program of the National Institute of Health. He has also received a $325,451 grant from INBRE to support the VATDEP’s development.

Often, Halic said, cadavers or living patients are used in training for rotator cuff surgery.

“That’s the reason we wanted to introduce a virtual environment where they can simply get these skills easily, or maybe in a safe manner, without hurting anybody,” said Halic, who noted the VATDEP is in its fourth year of development.

The VATDEP contains tools that simulate shoulder tears and surgical instruments in a virtual environment. It features a fiber-optic camera and is equipped with a monitor to project images from the camera in real time. Some items for the project were even 3D printed on campus.

Halic and his team of student researchers have been collaborating with a shoulder and elbow surgery expert at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences to fine-tune the simulator.

A total of nine students have assisted in the VATDEP’s creation and progress. They helped oversee the use of hardware devices, software development and algorithm creation that will make training with the VATDEP possible.

“Before I came here, I had limited information about computer graphics,” said Mustafa Tunc ’18, whose thesis involved the VATDEP. “I learned everything about graphics here in this lab.”

The VFAST, on the other hand, takes the standard Fundamentals of Arthroscopic Surgery Training (FAST) tool and translates its benefits to a virtual environment.

With use of the portable FAST tool, residents can perform various psychomotor tasks to build skills like arthroscope camera navigation, ambidexterity, anchor placement and knot tying. Tasks can include using a small grasper to transfer small rings to other pegs and navigating a small ball through a maze. FAST training also requires the presence of an expert surgeon to score residents. Through the VFAST, however, that requirement will be eliminated.

“The whole idea is with the virtual simulation, we can control everything, and we can simply record all the metrics about your performance,” Halic said. “We can give you a score about where you are without needing anybody.”

The VFAST can also create advanced levels of each task, which the current FAST does not offer.

”I think that this will be the future technology,” said Kutay Macit, a computer science graduate student. “In the future, we will not be dependent on, for education, these physical devices.”

Doga Demirel ’18, who received a master’s in computer science from UCA, was one of the first students to work on the VFAST. He led the task analysis portion of the project, which required understanding each training task and its phases.

“I think what’s most interesting here is what we do is to actually help surgeons get the experience that they need to help their patients,” he said. “That’s very important.”

Halic and his team note that it can take years to wrap up projects like the VATDEP and VFAST.

“Our ultimate goal is to simply create a virtual platform for surgeons so they can improve and master their skills so that we don’t risk patients anymore,” Halic said. “That’s the ultimate goal.”

Most people on the University of Central Arkansas campus know Rebekah Rasnick ’77 as Becky, but to many students on campus, she is “Mama Bear.”

Rasnick first earned the Mama Bear nickname while working as academic adviser for the athletics department. Students would come to her office and instantly notice her collection of bears, with many of those being purple.

“We started running across purple bears,” she said. “It’s hard to find a purple bear, so when you find a purple bear, you just can’t pass it up.”

Then students and parents began adding to her accumulation. She said families would see a bear and buy it because they thought of her.

Between the bears she found herself and others gifted, Rasnick now owns a collection that she can “bearly” count.

“Just counting on the outline of my office, I counted 100, but I didn’t look at the [Christmas bear] tree or the other bears in the corner, so probably 200,” she said.

Rasnick is now the BTĚěĚĂregistrar. She started at BTĚěĚĂin 1996 and has worked in several capacities over the past 20-plus years.

Her current office in Harrin Hall includes several purple bears, but she also has bear fans, bear plant stands, bear lamps, a bear footstool, mugs and a bear writing pen and inkwell, as well as wooden, ceramic, glass, tea light and Boyds bears.

At home, she stores her holiday bear collections for Halloween, Easter, the Fourth of July and Christmas, and rotates them throughout the year.

All told, she can’t say exactly how many bears she owns.

“I’ve kind of slowed down on the bears since I am not advising anymore and not seeing as many students,” Rasnick said. “If it’s a purple bear, I get it. If it’s a generic bear, no.”

Rasnick also owns several pieces of bear jewelry like earrings, bracelets, necklaces, rings and pins. She wears the bears when she is not wearing purple, which she admits is not often.

“If I don’t have purple on, people go, ‘Oh, you don’t have on purple?’ They even do that at Sunday school,” she said. “Somehow I have a bear or purple on every day. You might not be able to see it, but I’ll have a bear on somewhere.”

In anticipation of her retirement in a few years, Rasnick began moving bears from her office. At least 50 of her bears now reside in other parts of the registrar’s office suite. With so many others, she has not decided what she will do with the entire collection.

In her true Mama Bear spirit, she has one idea to host an office sale then donate the funds to a scholarship. Her love for BTĚěĚĂand her bear collection is only surpassed by her love of BTĚěĚĂstudents.

“The athletes would introduce me as their BTĚěĚĂmother, and it was fine,” she said. “If I can help them, I am glad to be a mother.”