NVC is a public community college in the Alamo Community Colleges District (ACCD) located in San Antonio, Texas. In Fall 2023 enrollment was just over 18,800 and graduation rates for the past 5 years have ranged between 2,644 and 3,239. NVC is designated as a Hispanic Serving Institution and it serves many first time in college students and military veterans. Most students are enrolled part time, and it is a commuter campus (all students live off campus and commute to the school daily or attend online).

At NVC students can earn Associates degrees (33 two-year degrees), Certificates (12 certificate programs), Marketable Skill Achievement awards, transferable academic credits, and continuing education credits. Students can earn an Associates of Arts or Science in a variety of STEM-related disciplines from Biology and Chemistry to Psychology and Engineering. Beginning in the fall of 2024 students will also be able to earn a Bachelor of Applied Technology in Cloud Computing.

The college’s recent completed quality enhancement plan focused on “equip[ing] students with information literacy skills that [will] show them how to find, ethically use, synthesize, and evaluate information in their classes and their co-curricular programs” (Northwest Vista College, 2023, para. 1). NVCsi aligned with the quality enhancement plan, as well as with other college initiatives focused on student engagement, achievement, and semester to semester retention.

The inaugural NVCsi event occurred in 2017 and has been repeated annually (most recently in 2023) with interruptions only occurring in response to the global pandemic. The learning objectives are to increase engagement with mathematics, encourage cross-discipline synthesis of learning, increase critical thinking skills, and decrease MA. Assessment of these learning goals is a work in progress and is the focus of our efforts now that the event has become established. It is our belief and experience that NVCsi has had a substantial positive impact on students at our college. Another focus is to encourage other campuses to create a similar event.

NVCsi is an annual day-long, multidisciplinary event, with student, staff, and faculty participation as well as community partnerships. The event has grown in participation each year. The inaugural event involved five disciplines (Accounting, Anthropology, Biology, Mathematics, and Psychology) as well as one campus partnership (Alamo Colleges Police Department (ACPD)). That year there were seven interactive exhibits, each linked to both mathematics and forensics. An effort is made to have several exhibits connected to each other, such as having students take photographs (Fine Arts department) and measurements (Mathematics department) of a crime scene grid (ACPD) as well as interview “witnesses” (Speech department) at the crime scene and write up the information into a report (English department). The most recent event, held in 2023, involved 10 disciplines (Anthropology, Fine Arts, Biology, Criminal Justice, Mathematics, Engineering, English, Psychology, and Speech), three campus partnerships (ACPD, Risk Management, and Library Sciences), and six community partnerships. In 2023 NVCsi there were over 25 interactive exhibits, each one with a link to both mathematics and forensics.

Preparations start at least a year before the event occurs, because depending on institutional policies and procedures, several decisions need to be made 11 to 12 months in advance. At NVC those early decisions include securing potential dates for the event as well as selecting and reserving the venue(s) that will be used. We choose to coordinate our event with another large-scale event at our campus whose topic dovetails well with our own. However, we avoid overlapping with other events to encourage student participation, increase presenter participation levels, and secure a venue on campus that encourages foot traffic and exposure. When securing the venue so far in advance, we often only have a general idea of the amount of space that we will require, so we err on the side of caution and reserve more space. This has allowed us to grow the event as interest has increased.

Another logistical consideration that needs to be made early in the planning cycle is the application for, and securing of, funding. This allows for the creation of a budget which impacts the types of exhibits that are possible as well as the purchase of supplies. It has been our experience that a budget for food and drinks is important as it results in a lot of initial foot traffic that then translates into students interacting with the exhibits.

Approximately 7–8 months before the event we begin to plan more of the details for the event and the date for the event is finalized. We gage interest among past presenters and generate interest in new presenters, including inviting community partners to come to campus. In recent years we have started to invite student clubs and honor societies to participate in the event. As presenters commit to having an exhibit, we start to order the supplies they require. Many supplies can be reused, though some need to be repurchased and/or replenished. It is important to confirm with the institution when the last day to order supplies is so that important deadlines are met. Around this time, we start working with the public relations department to draft flyers and other documents that will be used to advertise the event (see Figure 1).

In the months before the event a lot has been planned, and now many things that need to be finalized. At this point the exhibits are finalized, and supplies distributed to the presenters. As the exhibits are finalized a passport (see Figure 2) is created to track participation (see planned assessments for further details). A map showing where each exhibit will be located is needed, to ensure that those who have specific needs (e.g., access to electricity) have access to them. The map should be shared at multiple meetings and via email to reduce the need for last-minute changes. Marketing and advertising for the event starts at least a few weeks before the event occurs.

In terms of logistical details, items such as food and drink purchases are finalized, IT requests are submitted, work orders for tables/chairs/canopies are submitted, and requests for volunteers are made. Partnerships and communication with the appropriate campus departments are critical for the smooth operation of these logistical details.

The broad theme of NVCsi is that math is a part of everyday life, and that elements of math can be found in a wide variety of disciplines. As a result, each exhibit links to math in some way. A secondary theme is forensics; therefore most exhibits also link to forensics.

Faculty have been incredibly creative in finding ways to link less obvious disciplines to these themes. It has been our experience that all disciplines and campus departments have been able to participate, making this event good at building community and collaboration. At NVC individual instructors are responsible for the selection of assignments in their courses, therefore follow-up assignments to the NVCsi exhibits are at the discretion of the instructors. Some have chosen to have graded assignments, such as submitting evidence of attendance or writing a short statement about what they learned at the exhibits (see Supplementary materials 1). At present no systematic data has been collected on how many professors are including this type of assignment, nor has student feedback been collected. Both forms of data are planned for future event cycles since they will provide evidence of the second and third stages of the EL theory learning cycle (Kolb, 2015; Kolb and Kolb, 2017).

One of the centerpieces is a crime scene grid “Measuring Bones” that is designed and run by the ACPD. An area is marked out with stakes and string into a grid formation and pieces of evidence are distributed in the grid (see Figure 3). Student participants work together to measure the location of evidence relative to each other (see Supplementary materials 2) and plot the evidence on a grid, with scaled measurements and relative positions accurately represented. The various pieces of evidence are also labeled on the diagram. The evidence varies from year to year, but has included bones, receipts, and skid marks. At an exhibit presented by the English department students learn how to write up the information from the grid into a report. At an exhibit presented by the Fine Arts department students learn how to take photographs of the evidence and how to integrate them into their written report. At an exhibit by the speech department students learn how to interview a witness and use inductive reasoning to move from the specific evidence to a conclusion. Other departments could link into the crime scene grid by measuring the size of the bones that can be included in the grid to determine the sex of the victim.

Not all of the exhibits link to the crime scene grid, and some vary from one event cycle to another. All exhibits involve an interactive EL component. One exhibit that is regularly repeated is a facial reconstruction exhibit presented by the anthropology department (see Figure 4). This exhibit looks at measurements between facial elements and uses modeling clay to create the reconstruction. A blood spatter exhibit is presented by the mathematics department (see Figure 5). The exhibit looks at the trajectory of spatter to determine a likely point of origin. At the 2023 NVCsi event the psychology department partnered with Therapy Animals of San Antonio, a non-profit organization. Their volunteers brought therapy animals to campus to interact with students. Students learned about animal-assisted therapy, how therapy animals are used to help victims, and how the efficacy of animal-assisted therapy could be evaluated with the scientific method and statistical tests.

Our primary goal has been to establish and grow this event from a small group of disciplines to a large established annual event. As mentioned previously, the event has grown from seven interactive elements in 2017 to over 25 interactive elements in 2023 and has grown over the same time frame from six to over 15 different collaborating groups involved in the planning and implementation of the event. Student attendance has also grown from an estimated 200–250 participants in 2017 to an estimated 300–350 participants in 2023, and additional growth is expected as activity on campus continues to grow following the global pandemic.

If NVCsi is to be replicated, the impact of the event needs to be formally assessed to convince stakeholders (students, administrators, and presenters) of the value added by the experiential learning event (Chan, 2023). Since the EL is not directly linked to a course, and instead aims to influence holistic competencies, the assessment should be formative rather than summative. This will also add to calls for empirical research on the use of formative assessments in higher education (Parmigiani et al., 2024).

Now that the event has been established, we are turning our attention to measuring the impact of the event on both the presenters and participants. An engagement tracker termed a “passport” was implemented in 2018 (see Figure 2 for an example). After a student interacts with an exhibit a mark is made on a paper form that the students are given. When they have interacted with a set minimum of exhibits, which varies per event cycle as a function of the number of exhibits, they return their passport and are entered in a drawing for a prize. This allows the organizers to track the participants, and in the future may be used to identify student demographic characteristics (e.g., intended major and year of study). In 2023 300–350 passports were given to participants, and 141 passports were returned. Many students interacted with the EL activities but do not utilize the passport, so this is an underestimate of student participation.

The number of students participating will continue to be tracked with the physical passport system. Additional measures to assess the impact of the event on participants and presenters are planned for future event cycles. In terms of the participants, engagement will be assessed during the event by giving students the opportunity to express the impact that the event has had on them with physical and/or digital responses to question prompts. Participants will also be given the opportunity to provide event feedback through a digital post-event survey. In line with EL theory, questions on both assessments will be written to encourage reflection on the experience and to measure changes in attitudes.

In terms of the presenters, engagement and impact will be assessed through a digital post-event survey. The questions asked will aim to measure the time and effort dedicated to the event to give new presenters an accurate estimate of what will be expected of them.

The success of NVCsi has been made possible by the community of faculty and staff members at NVC. Having a large group of people involved has been valuable in terms of having a diverse set of skills and information, and in terms of diversity of ideas. Over the years the forms, processes, and guidelines have changed, but by having representatives from a variety of departments we have always had someone who either knew what to do or who to ask when a question or issue arose.

The impact of NVCsi on students, staff, and faculty has increased as presenter engagement has grown. With each event cycle the exhibits attract attention and generate new ideas. Advertising about the event in multiple modalities is important, but a lot of the attendance is based on visibility. The location and timing of the event, when measured by attendance and engagement, has a substantial impact on the success of the event. Consistency in terms of the general date of the event is also important because it allows those involved to plan for this event around other obligations. Colleges interested in this activity should attempt to maintain consistent timing for the event to gain recognition and to aid in planning.

This event has been most successful when held in person rather than online. We are confident that others have successfully organized an online EL event, but our model did not translate well to an online platform. One event was hosted through our learning management platform because of the global pandemic. The engagement from both presenters and participants was low. The impact of the event did not warrant the organizational and planning that the event required. With a different team the result could be different, however we have decided not to repeat the event digitally.

Two limitations bear discussion. The first relates to EL theory and the structure of the event. NVCsi is a single day campus-wide event, and as a result the event has been generally limited to the first stage of the EL theory cycle. Much of the focus has been on the organization and presentation of the exhibits, which is when the learner has a concrete experience (Kolb, 2015; Kolb and Kolb, 2017). It is possible that our learners engage in the other stages of the EL theory cycle but we do not have that data. Now that NVCsi is an annual event, we plan to assess whether instructors are taking the concrete experience that their students have had at NVCsi and expanding the learning experience into the other stages of EL theory. Once we have a sense of what is being done to encourage those stages then we can consider what can be done to increase the impact of the event. This could be in the format of ideas for activities that instructors could choose to integrate into their classrooms. Alternatively, it may be possible to create opportunities for stages three and four of EL theory that remain independent of the classroom structure.

The second limitation relates to assessment of the impact of NVCsi on the presenters and student learners. This event was in response to seeing a lack of understanding of the relevance of math to potential careers, the application of mathematics across disciplines, and resistance to mathematics in general. We combined these observations with the knowledge of how impactful EL can be, and the event was created. When the first NVCsi was organized, we did not realize that the event would occur more than once. As a result, the event was created without consideration of assessing the impact of the event. We have developed a method of more accurately measuring the number of participants. It is now important to find a way to gauge some of the impact that the event has on our learning community, both the presenters and the participants.