ARIZONA SUMMER Find out where to heat up with Hot Jazz Page 6 JULY 14-20, 2010 dailywildcat.com
School kids learn to be Digidudes, Techdivas By Bethany Barnes ARIZONA SUMMER WILDCAT While many college students are clueless when it comes to designing a website, the elementary school children in the Eller College of Management’s Digidudes and Techdivas camp are getting firsthand experience in website development and creating their own business. A four-week camp,in which approximately 100 children participated, the theme of this year’s
camp was “My Dream Business.” Last year’s theme was“My Dream Vacation.” Each session lasted a week and alternated between third- through fifth-graders and sixththrough eighth-graders. The camp provides a learning experience for the children who participate in it and teaching opportunities for the Eller students involved. “It’s been really helpful, it’s almost like running your own business, which is ironic because of the theme this year,” said Andrew Horrigan, early outreach program director. Seven UA interns
were in charge of creating lesson plans and teaching for the camp. “The interns have worked together really hard,” Horrigan said. Melissa Tirendi, a junior majoring in pre-business and Spanish, said she has enjoyed the experience so much that she didn’t notice that she was putting in 40 hours of work a week. “It’s just been fun spending time with interns and (there is the) the fact that the kids get to learn all these awesome things that I didn’t know when I was little,”Tirendi said. Horrigan said he thinks the biggest thing UA students gain from the program
is practical knowledge, something often missed in the classroom. “It’s a whole different story when you are in charge of real people,”he said. During the camp, the interns showed students how to make flyers, commercials, budgets and use various software and 3-D rendering programs. “Overall, this has been the best year,” Horrigan said of this year’s program. A new feature this year is a camp blog. The blog allows parents to be able to comment and stay up to date on their child’s camp experience. “The big thing this year is website development,”Horrigan said. WORKSHOP, page 3
Gordon Bates /Arizona Summer Wildcat
The Early Outreach Program uses undergraduates from the Eller College of Business to run Digidudes and Techdivas Camp. The summer program teaches Tucson school children how to start a business and utilize web-related software.
A synthetic, SPORTS legal high
Byrne settles into hectic AD role
By Vincent Balistreri ARIZONA SUMMER WILDCAT
By Eli MacKinnon ARIZONA SUMMER WILDCAT
If it looks like marijuana and it smells like marijuana and it gets you high like marijuana, then maybe it is“spice.” Spice, also known as K2, is the generic name for a legal, synthetic form of marijuana that is both produced and sold in Tucson. Spice is sold at head shops and it is often marketed as an herbal incense blend. At Moon Smoke Shop, a head shop on Fourth Avenue, customers can buy a gram of Tucson-produced Blue Moon Cherry herbal incense for $13.75. The fact that spice is selling for $14 a gram, sometimes more, suggests to some that people aren’t buying it for its fragrance. “I was under the impression that people were using it to get high, not smelling it in their apartment,”said Mahala Lewis, a studio arts and anthropology junior. Like marijuana, spice can be mixed with tobacco and rolled into a joint or smoked directly from a pipe or bong. The drug contains synthetic cannabinoids that target the same receptors in the brain as tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC, the active ingredient in marijuana. “The chemical in spice was originally developed in a lab as a liquid, marijuana-like substance that could be used to study the effects of marijuana,”said Keith Boesen, the managing director of the Arizona SPICE, page 3
Arizona athletic director Greg Byrne sat behind his desk staring at the walls of his spacious office, trying to remember all the places he had visited over the past two months. Struggling to remember all the cities he had stopped in, it was as if a light bulb had turned on and city names began flowing out,“L.A., San Diego, San Francisco, Houston,”said Byrne before pausing to remember whether Dallas was one of many cities visited.“Trying to remember whether I’ve been to Dallas or not,”he said before going on to add Mississippi to the list. It’s clear that the new athletic director is a man with a hellacious schedule. Since officially replacing former athletic director Jim Livengood on May 1, Byrne has seemingly been traveling around the U.S. and back, and will be flying to Chicago this week. In the last couple of months, Byrne has spent time looking at budgets, marketing plans, fundraising plans and facility plans. None of that includes the time he has spent meeting with donors and the leadership on the UA campus; the majority of his work is done outside of Tucson. “A lot of my time is spent trying to get my arms around it all,”Byrne said.“But I feel a lot better about it now than where I was a couple months ago.” Though Arizona’s athletic director has been mostly away from the office taking care of business, he still has managed to keep in touch with the Arizona community through social media. Byrne has a Twitter account,
Gordon Bates/Arizona Summer Wildcat
UA athletic director Greg Byrne, who has traveled tirelessly of late, sits in his McKale Center office on July 9.
which he uses regularly to stay connected with fans of the program, something no UA athletic director had done before. “What Twitter and Facebook allow you to do is get your message out there,” Byrne said. “It has people thinking about UA on (a) regular basis, there’s a lot of value in that.” Byrne, 38, has 2,435 followers and is sure when students come back after summer break, that number will go up. “I’m counting (on) when students come back that a lot of them will follow us,”he said.
“We’ll do some giveaways, in fact I gave away two tickets to the Yankees and Diamondbacks game up at Chase Field a few weeks back. “It’s (an) easy way to communicate in an effective manner, that you get up-to-date information out quickly to a large number of people,” Byrne added. “We’ve had a good response to it thus far.” During the time that Byrne has been tweeting and scrambling around the country, BYRNE, page 8