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A University of Colorado at Boulder conference April 3 and April 4 will feature contests for civil engineering students from the Rocky Mountain region who have designed and built concrete canoes and small steel bridges.

Canon City High School students will see Shakespeare taken from the page to the stage next week by the University of Colorado at Boulder’s acclaimed Colorado Shakespeare Festival. Two professional actors with the Colorado Shakespeare Festival will perform scenes, songs and sonnets in a program titled, “Boy Meets Girl Meets Shakespeare,” Monday, March 30, at Canon City High School, 1313 College Ave. The actors will perform at two 50-minute assemblies beginning at noon and 1:30 p.m.

A new ranking of the nationÂ’s law schools by a University of Texas at Austin professor places the University of Colorado School of Law at No. 16 in educational quality, a much higher ranking than the school received this year from U.S. News and World Report, which critics say penalizes public universities in its analysis.

Today is Wednesday, March 18, 1998. The University of Colorado at Boulder will close early today at 2:00 p.m. due to heavy snow. A decision will be made prior to 6:00 a.m. on Thursday, March 19 as to whether the campus will be open Thursday. With the exception of essential services staff, all university personnel are authorized to leave work at 2:00 p.m. Please call 303-492-5500, or pay attention to local media, for updates. For information concerning Continuing Education classes, please call 303-735-5000.

The forces and technology that make flight possible will be the subject of the next CU Wizards science program for children. The free show begins at 9:30 a.m. Saturday, March 28, in Duane Physics room G-030, on the CU-Boulder campus. Duane Physics is located on Colorado Avenue across from Folsom Stadium. Physics Professor Paul Beale, also associate dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, said the program he’ll present on “The Physics of Flight” will look at everything from paper airplanes to rockets.

The University of Colorado at Boulder will implement several changes in its commencement ceremony this spring. The College of Arts and Sciences, CU-BoulderÂ’s largest, will hold special recognition ceremonies for all of its graduates, estimated at about 1,700. The college plans to conduct as many as 30 ceremonies at the department level, with some small departments clustering along interdisciplinary lines, before or after the main commencement ceremony at Folsom Stadium on May 15.

The rate of minority engineering freshmen at the University of Colorado at Boulder returning for their sophomore year reached an all-time high of 87 percent in fall 1997, nearly double the national average.

John D. Hoag, professor emeritus of art history at the University of Colorado at Boulder, will present a series of lectures on Mayan art this spring at the Boulder Public Library Auditorium. The series, which is free and open to the public, will begin on March 24 at 6:30 p.m. Subsequent lectures will be presented on March 31, April 7 and April 14, all at 6:30 p.m. in the library auditorium.

Joseph Piper, president of Integra Bio-Health in Boulder, and his wife, Lisa, are thanking CU-BoulderÂ’s Center for Entrepreneurship by giving it a 5 percent interest in the future earnings of the new venture funds general partner interest. Piper, who will finish the MBA program in entrepreneurship and finance at the College of Business in May, recently started the company with his partners and classmates Thomas Bleyer, Theresa Jamerson and Hans Lundin.

Professor Laurel Rasplica Rodd, chair of the CU-Boulder department of East Asian languages and literatures, has received the 1998 Scholarship Award from the Colorado Congress of Foreign Language Teachers. Rodd was cited for her "contributions and dedication to the teaching profession" by the professional association of all foreign language teachers in the state. The award was presented in a ceremony on Feb. 26.