The inaugural Pencil Pushers Class at University of the Pacific Eberhardt School of Business (ESB) is winding down its spring semester this week. I mentioned this class in my earlier post here.

Pencil Pushers ClassOne of the class highlights was designing and implementing the Kids Art Day at the Ballpark Contest held at the Pacific Tigers May 4th baseball game vs. UC Riverside. Children who attended the game received a complimentary sample pack of California Republic pencils and had some fun coloring and drawing throughout the afternoon. A raffle drawing included several variety packages of California Republic’s premium quality Palomino Artist pencil range.

We also congratulated the winning artists from our recently completed Pacific Baseball theme drawing contest whose artwork was displayed on the jumbotron during the game. We thank the students and teachers from Presentation, Kohl Open, Claudia Landeen, Brookside and John Muir Elementary schools for participating in the drawing contest and we're fortunate enough that our 4th-7th grade winner showed up at the game to receive her prize as well. To see a selection of participant drawings, visit the Kids Art Day @ the Ballpark Gallery and click on any of the images to enlarge and view the other images in the gallery.

Finally, I'd like to thank the six students of the Applied Entrepreneurship class (a.k.a. Pencil Pushers) who participated this semester with the launch of the Pencils.com site. I look forward to continued involvement with Pacific's ESB students via our summer intern program and continuing with this course next fall.

One of my major goals for the Pencils.com site is the resource it can be for students and teachers alike. Whether it's teacher to teacher sharing of favorite lesson plans, an information source for students writing a paper, or an on line drawing lesson, this site has been designed around the concept of collaborative sharing and learning. I hope that Pencils.com members will use the site to experiment with new learning ideas and concepts.

In a very major way the means by which we will operate the Pencils.com business will be as a learning laboratory in itself. Through a unique new collaboration with the University of the Pacific Business School we have developed a new course in Applied Entrepreneurship in which the students enrolled in this course will play a very significant roll in the operation of the business. By getting the chance to apply the broad disciplines they are learning at the Eberhardt School of Business students will become intimately involved in all major aspects of running this site.