CAS Connection Experiential Learning archive

Drones Defying Gravity

GEOGRAPHY - Look! Up in the sky! It’s a bird. It’s a plane—it’s students using drones for mapping! High-flying unmanned aerial vehicles, commonly known as drones, are increasingly used to map and analyze large areas, especially in a world impacted by climate change. To prepare students for mapping-related careers, the College of Arts and Sciences’ Department of Geography offers a Mapping with Drones course during the spring term.

Strange New Worlds

PHYSICS - Could life exist elsewhere in the Milky Way galaxy? A group of College of Arts and Sciences undergraduate planet hunters are helping NASA discover unknown worlds beyond our solar system. Read more in the December sci-fi issue of CAS Connection.

Volcano

Four months later and 62 miles away, University of Oregon student Marcus Chaknova was sailing around the Lau Basin with marine biologists from the College of Arts and Sciences’ Oregon Institute of Marine Biology and other universities, looking for snails and other organisms at hydrothermal vents—deep-sea hot springs where seawater and magma combine and enable a rare set of organisms to thrive without any sunlight.