Featured Projects
Immersive learning experiences have helped our students gain real-world skills as they've explored the world and changed their communities.
All seven colleges and 45 academic departments have conducted upwards of 1,000 projects between 2007 and 2012. About 16,400 students have engaged in these transformative experiences to impact our region, our state, and our world. Below are some of the university’s featured immersive learning projects:
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Fourteen Ball State students adapted Cathy Day's Hoosier novel The Circus in Winter into an original musical that has won a series of national accolades, including honors at the National Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival and inclusion in the National Alliance for Musical Theatre’s 2012 Festival of New Musicals.
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Providing Dignity
Ball State apparel design students partnered with IU Health Ball Memorial Hospital to transform drafty, pea-green gowns into cozy, dignified apparel for patients with cancer. In June 2011, the team revealed a handful of designs, which include soft ruffles and wrap dresses for women and, for men, lapels that lend themselves to the look of a robe or smoking jacket.
Global Reach
A team of Ball State journalism graphics students worked to develop informational graphics for global news organization Circle of Blue, a consortium of leading journalists, design experts, and scientists dedicated to chronicling the murky intricacies of the global water crisis. The immersive learning experience exposed impassioned students to the demands of professional journalism and the significance of water scarcity on the sweeping political, social, and economic issues of our time.
Anything but Average
Theatre professor Jennifer Blackmer and sociology professor Melinda Messineo teamed up in spring 2011 to offer an immersive learning experience for students from various disciplines to delve into the impetus and implications of the Middletown studies, which sought to identify cultural norms and sociological change during the mid-1920s. The project culminated with a reading of The Middletown Theatre Project, a play born of exhaustive research and heartfelt interviews with Muncie residents.
Technical Solutions
NPower is a network of nonprofit organizations committed to connecting charitable groups with efficient technology solutions. Through three immersive learning projects, Ball State has become a powerful part of that charge. Under the mentorship of information systems professor Catherine Chen, a team of students from information systems, telecommunications, and marketing produced training videos and conducted workshops for nonprofit executives to learn about the applications of cloud computing. Students also collaborated with NPower to research free and low-cost software tools for nonprofits’ network management, donor tracking, and security.
Other Projects
In addition to these exciting projects, you can learn more about immersive learning projects sponsored by Building Better Communities (BBC), which matches Ball State’s expertise and resources with community partners throughout the state, and the Virginia B. Ball Center for Creative Inquiry, which has been exploring the connections among the arts, humanities, sciences, and technology through student-produced projects since 2000.