NRCC History Book

92 and Takia Kasey placed first, second, or third. Five PBL members, including Amanda Jeanne Cooper, Kellie Fore, Kaitlyn Hagreen, Emily Jessee, and Cindy McPeak, won awards at the 2014 state competition. First or second place awards were received in 2016 by Angela Jones, Franklin Kerr, Tiffany Keith, Sean Gibson, Ibrahim Khokhar, Kiwon Lee, Nishant Grover, and Lance Jones. Winners at the state competitions attended PBL National Leadership Conferences, and the following NRCC students brought home national awards: Eric Rasmussen, Pamela Rutherford, Margie Tabor, Cole Harden, and Ibrahim Khokhar. In 2011 NRCC transfer student Danny Hazelwood was one of 10 students in the VCCS selected for the Valley Proteins Fellows Program. Hazelwood participated in a leadership curriculum and community service project and received $10,000 in addition to full tuition and fees from the Virginia Foundation for Community College Education. Several students were named Commonwealth Legacy Scholars during this decade, including Anthony Turpin, Savanna Nicole Bane, Dustin Ray Dishon, Megan Mercer, Luan Demoraes, Eva Tieg Hardy, Jameson Cockram, Michael A. Smith, Kennedi Boyd, and Morgan Hudson From 2010 to 2015 NRCC’s Game Design Studio team, led by James St. Claire, student, and Heather Walters, adjunct instructor, created educational games to align with Virginia’s Standards of Learning (SOL) assessments. These games, which focused on elementary-level math, language arts, and earth science, were used as learning aids in and out of the classroom. Since 2010, over 225,000 units have been sold worldwide. NRCC was the only community college in Virginia to offer this type of program and internships in game development and game

design.

In the summer of 2014, art students enrolled in ART 102 - History of Art: Renaissance to Modern and ART 132 - Three-Dimension Design had the opportunity to meet course requirements by studying abroad for two weeks. Led by Tammy Parks, professor of art, students traveled to Italy and participated in museum visits, art and architecture discussions, lectures from guest artists, and other cultural experiences. Students kept a daily observation log and completed a final project. Summer travel experiences led by Parks continued each year and included trips to England, Scotland, Portugal, Spain, the Balkans, Greece, and Germany. NRCC’s drone team, a group of students led by Jeff Levy, instructor of drafting, and Brandon Dillon, engineering adjunct faculty, received national recognition in 2015 for their drone project, the New River Harrier. The drone was entered in the American Helicopter Society (AHS) Vertical Take Off and Landing Drone Design competition sponsored by Boeing and won first place in the “Best New Entrant” category. The AHS confirmed that NRCC was the first two-year school to place in the competition since AHS began in 1984. Additional recognition of the college’s engineering design technology students occurred when students used reverse engineering to create a virtual 3D model of Queen Anne’s Revenge, the flagship of the legendary pirate Blackbeard. The model is included in the expanded Queen Anne’s Revenge exhibit of Blackbeard’s artifacts at the North Carolina Maritime Museum. Several members of NRCC’s Omega Eta Chapter of Phi Theta Kappa (PTK) received the national Coca-Cola Leaders of Promise $1,000 scholarship from 2010 to

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