MUNCIE, Ind.— Four teams of Ball State University students hope to change the way the rest of us look at the world with $20,000 grants to create virtual tours for museums, literary scholars, and campus orientations.

“This kind of project creates a different kind of student,” said Joe Trimmer, director of the Virginia B. Ball Center for Creative Inquiry, a learning center that stresses collaborative thinking on projects that result in real products.

“These students will never learn the same way,” he said. They’re so involved in the making of their own knowledge and sharing that knowledge that their view of the educational process changes.”

This was the first competition of its kind funded by the iCommunication initiative, a $20 million grant from Lilly Endowment Inc. Twenty student teams submitted proposals, and a committee of faculty and students from diverse disciplines selected the four finalists.

“Being part of this project makes me feel like I’m a step ahead of the competition. This is real-world experience,” says Mark Miller, a 20-year-old junior from Goshen, Ind. “It’s a great test for how to get people to work together and to delegate in order to complete this large-scale project on time.”

The teams are in charge as business managers and are given a great deal of autonomy in how they handle their $20,000 budgets, purchasing equipment and arranging travel stipends if needed. They also deal with deadlines and personalities.

“By involving students in our research and development process, they not only adapt to the digital industry themselves, but some of their ideas could help take us in new directions,” said Rodger Smith, content director of the Center for Media Design, who has reviewed most of the iCommunication grants administered on campus.

The four student projects funded for a total of $80,000 are:

• An interactive Web site for Muncie’s Mitchell Place Gallery, which will include 3-D and game imagery, digital video, and animation.
• An interactive tour for literary scholars tracing Ernest Hemingway’s steps as he wrote “A Moveable Feast,” which will include video, photography, and audio storytelling.
• A digital learning experiment crafted for the Muncie Children’s Museum, which will include digital music, a “wall of sound” with levers and knobs that produce different sounds, and interactive play stations.
• A self-guided Ball State campus tour for a Palm Pilot, which also will feature points of interest near campus such as Dave Letterman Way.

Projects will be in production this summer.

(Note to Editors: For more information, contact Fred Johnson, media project manager, at (765) 287-0117 or abjohnson@bsu.edu.)