School news

UNIVERSITY OF ARKANSAS AT LITTLE ROCK

Kyle Hooks of Bentonville was one of more than 30 University of Arkansas at Little Rock students who participated in the UA BlockChain Hackathon at the University of Arkansas held Sept. 28-29.

The hackathon featured 21 teams from Arkansas colleges and universities and was sponsored by nine large businesses such as IBM, Tyson, Heifer International and J.B. Hunt, who provided challenges focused on using BlockChain technology for teams to present during the competition. Each of the nine sponsors chose a team to advance to the finals where they presented their results against the winners of other challenges.

“BlockChain refers to a distributed database platform that allows for the secure processing and management of transactions across a network,” explained Dr. Liz Pierce, chair of UA Little Rock’s Department of Information Science. “It is the technology behind BitCoin and is also of great interest to companies like J.B. Hunt and Walmart who want to be able to track transactions across many different producers and suppliers.”

Two UA Little Rock teams, representing J.B. Hunt and ArcBest, each won in their challenges and presented their developments in the finals. All of UA Little Rock’s competitors were undergraduates with little to no prior BlockChain experience or knowledge, while most of their competition came from graduate students from the University of Arkansas’ BlockChain Center of Excellence.

Students Karen Watts, Michael DiCicco, and Brenda Nyangweso won J.B. Hunt’s challenge and went on to represent them in the finals, along with Aaron David, Brock Butler, Hunter Wright, Ian Thompson, and Sunny Singh from the ArcBest team.

An additional 25 more UA Little Rock students also took part in the competition: Thomas Emmerling, Naveed Siddiqui, Brenda Chepkorir, Yinqi Chen, Ryan Moore, Peter Israsena, Hengchang Liao, Nicholas Stewart, Zhenlin Jin, Kyle Hooks, Zachary Long, Bushra Sajid, Saba Khalid, Christopher Lewis, Brady Moore, Moteet Bakeman, Mughal Minhaj Uddin, Lucas Rayburn, Hitaxiben Patel, Donovan Valestin, Shibani Lal, Richard Young, Malik El-Amin, Christian Aqui, and Kristen Stewart.

OPEN EDUCATION SOUTHERN SYMPOSIUM

Bryana Herrera of Springdale is one of a group of students who presented at the Open Education Southern Symposium held Oct. 1-2 at the University of Arkansas.

The symposium, co-sponsored by the University Libraries and Global Campus, connected supporters of open education for presentations, lightning talks, and panel discussions.

Open educational resources (OER) are educational materials in the public domain or introduced with an open license, meaning they can be used freely. Educational materials like textbooks, curriculum, lecture notes, syllabi, assignments, and tests would be open to the public and could be used by students and faculty without cost.

Edma Delgado-Solozano, assistant professor of Spanish, and students from the Spanish Introduction to Literature and Cultural Studies Class gave a presentation describing their development of materials for an OER textbook, the Antologia abierta de literatura hispana.

The textbook is the brainchild of Julie Ward, assistant professor of Spanish from the University of Oklahoma. The textbook is produced with student-generated content through the development of critical editions of canonical texts from Hispanic literature. The goal of this project is to crowd source entries including introductions, annotations in the text, and discussion questions of important literary texts in the public domain.

NORTHWEST TECHNICAL INSTITUTE

Ethan Mills, Automotive Service Technology student at Northwest Technical Institute in Springdale, has won the British Iron Touring Club of Northwest Arkansas scholarship for $1,000 in Matco Tools.

ROGERS STATE UNIVERSITY

Jacob Forbes of Springdale graduated from Rogers State University in Claremore, Okla., with a bachelor’s degree as part of the graduating class for summer 2018.