To all who come to this happy blog, welcome!

This blog will chronicle the adventures and discoveries made by Franklin College's 2020 immersive term study away course on "The STEAM Powering Disney: Imagineering and the Liberal Arts." Through this course, we will learn how Disney Imagineers draw ideas and inspiration from a wide variety of subjects and topics to create the many wonderful and immersive experiences at Walt Disney World and implement this knowledge in Imagineering a place on campus to better serve students, faculty, and visitors for years to come.

It all started with a Mouse

Well, the Disney part did at least, but inspiration for this specific course came from two places. The first was from a presentation at a math conference in Chicago by professors at Furman University on their course, "The Math and the Mouse." Using Disney as a teaching tool, they have successfully been guiding students on engaged learning experiences to the parks for several years. They were also more than willing to answer any questions we had about the logistics of putting together an experience like this, and for that we are grateful.

The second came from the Disney Imagineers themselves, and their annual Disney Imaginations design contest. The idea of focusing the course around such an important and well known part of what makes Disney Disney was immediately appealing, and made great use of the fact that our students would come from a wide variety of backgrounds and majors. In particular, their 2016 contest proved to be the perfect framework  from which to build our learning experiences and goals (Hourglass and Spirit of the Isle were two great inspirations)!

Our Story So Far...

Before leaving on our trip in January, our class met four times during the fall semester to help us prepare for our journey. At our first meeting, Zachary Balgeman took time to come visit us from the library. He talked about his experiences visiting Disney as part of a course when he was a student. He also led us on a park building exercise, making sure we wouldn't overlook the details of design, and gave us insight into the creation process for the Twilight Zone Tower of Terror.

At our October meeting,  we took the time to tour the Fitness Center, which is the building we will be focusing our re-Imagineering efforts on.  Built in 1908, the building has served the campus well as the home court of the Franklin Wonder Five, a concert hall for Chubby Checker and REO Speedwagon, a women's gymnasium, and even a temporary student center. Greg Cataldi took us behind the scenes to see the old pool, and we started to consider what sort of impact we could have on re-Imagineering the building to serve campus well for the next generations of students.

In November, we took the time to examine one particular problem that has a wide range of applications, namely the Knapsack problem. We first played with a (literal) toy model, trying to efficiently score the maximum number of points stacking duplos onto a car base. We then applied that knowledge to a very real world and relevant version of the knapsack problem: grocery shopping for each hotel room for a week. Much like the toy model, there are real world constraints that the students needed to work with: Amount of cash for purchasing items, amount of space and the amount of refrigerator space in the room, availability of deliverable goods and more.

At our final meeting in December, we had a special guest speaker, Franklin College alum and former Disney Cast Member Katherine Sergi. She was generous enough to take some time out of her schedule to talk about her experience in applying for internships and working at The Magic Kingdom in Walt Disney World. She also gave some suggestions and packing tips for what to take with us when we visit the parks in January, and really provided a great way to wrap up our last meeting before we departed campus at the end of the semester.

Where to from here

We are away from campus for now, but are all excitedly looking forward to our trip this January! Our course coordinator Brad Jones recently sent us pictures of our Magic Bands, just waiting to be worn when we get to Florida. The next entry on this blog will be on January 5th from the parks . I will be turning this blog over to the students so that they can narrate our experiences during our time away. Thanks for taking the time to visit our blog, and we look forward to sharing the journey with our readers!

Paul Fonstad, Associate Professor of Mathematics, Franklin College