Ball State University's Virginia B. Ball Center for Creative Inquiry has been awarded a $400,000 grant from the Edmund F. Ball and the Virginia B. Ball Foundation that will allow the program to continue to offer its semester-long immersive experiences.

"We are delighted that the Edmund F. Ball and the Virginia B. Ball Foundation has allowed the center to continue its work as the signature example of immersion learning at Ball State," said Joe Trimmer, the center's director.

Since 1999, the center has been exploring the connections among the arts, humanities, sciences and technology. Students spend an entire semester and earn a semester's worth of credits, connecting with community organizations or businesses and work on faculty-supervised teams to create products that illustrate collaborative research and interdisciplinary study. At the end of the semester, each team presents its product to the community.

"What's been rewarding about directing the center is working with the students, seeing the projects really take shape, and then watching them take off," Trimmer said. "These projects don't just sit on a shelf once the semester is over. They continue to benefit the partnering companies or organizations well after the students complete their work."

Some of the projects, like Sobrevivir, have benefited burgeoning Hispanic populations around the United States. In this project, the students produced telanovelas that dramatized some of the problems facing recent immigrants to the United States. More than 700 copies of the DVDs have been distributed across the country, and they have aired on Univision, the nation's largest Hispanic television network

Other student teams have produced books like "The Other Side of Middletown," published by San Franscisco-based publisher AltaMira. The book focused on the ethnographic study of Muncie's black community, a population overlooked in the original Middletown studies conducted in the 1920s. It recently earned the Margaret Mead Award for outstanding research.

In Muncie, "Designing Hope," has helped victims of cancer develop survival strategies. The documentary featured three area cancer survivors who told their own personal tales of surviving the often-deadly disease. The Cancer Center at Ball Memorial Hospital distributes the DVDs to its patients.

"These student-produced projects have set a great precedent for others to follow," Trimmer said. "I look forward to seeing what the future projects will be and how they contribute to the university's strategic initiative."

(Note to editors: For more information, contact Trimmer at (765) 287-0117 or jtrimmer@bsu.edu.)