2020 VISION

Ten ways Virginia Tech Faculty and Students Got Creative

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1. Fourteen students in a general chemistry course created and filmed kid-friendly science projects in their kitchens to help Wonder Universe, a nonprofit children’s museum in Christiansburg, Virginia.
2. While live-streaming, Kevin Hamed, a collegiate assistant professor in the Department of Fish and Wildlife Conservation, collected fish in a nearby stream so that students in his courses could see the process of catching and identifying fish, virtually of course.


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3. In a four-part video series, the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute (VTTI) provided virtual demonstrations of its Sharing the Road with Trucks safety program to high school drivers education students throughout the mid-Atlantic region.
4. Undergraduate students who participated in several data programs through University Libraries created tools and studied patterns in COVID-19 research data. This was a response to a request from the White House Office of Technology to help researchers keep up with ongoing research surrounding the pandemic.


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5. Students in a Department of Sociology feminist activism class shifted their plans for a live auction to an online auction and raised $1,150 for Aarti for Girls, a home for abandoned children in Kadapa, India.
6. Without access to a whiteboard at home, Mike Ellerbrock, a professor in the Department of Agricultural and Applied Economics, adapted the ways he works out problems and constructs graphs for his online classes by using Zoom, blank sheets of paper, and Word documents to walk students through solving economic problems.


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7. A dog skull, the hands and feet of various mammals, a lizard specimen, and more. Michelle Stocker, assistant professor of geobiology, loaded up her skeletons and other specimens and streamed video of them from her home for students in her Morphology of the Vertebrates class.
8. Paolo Scardina, an assistant professor of practice in the Charles E. Via Jr. Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, filmed parts of his course lectures while standing up to his ankles in creeks and waterways around campus, such as the Duck Pond, and in nearby areas. He teaches courses in fluid mechanics and water resources engineering.


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9. A Virginia Tech team with the Feed the Future Innovation Lab for Integrated Pest Management swapped in-person meetings with radio and virtual communications to help farmers in the developing world address crop problems. The lab, which operates nine projects in Africa and Asia aim to improve the livelihoods of small-scale farmers, is housed in the Center for International Research, Education, and Development.
10. Students in instructor Elizabeth McLain’s history and analytics of musical style class each were assigned a vocabulary word to teach to the class—by creating a 60-second TikTok video.