Don Colton, the first dean of Computer Science department at BYU–Hawaii, employee since 1997, and creator of MAPPER, retired in March 2016.
He said he and his wife, Lois, are going to Eugene, Oregon. He said, “I’ll probably teach again. Looking forward to grandkids.”
“Don cares a lot about student education,” said Dr. Geoffrey Draper, a Computer and Information Sciences associate professor of 7 years.
“I believe Don treats his work at BYUH almost like a Church calling. He’s not in it for the glory and certainly not for the money. All of his efforts over the past 19 years have been to serve the students and the Lord whose university this is.”
Draper pointed out two instances where Colton worked only to help students’ experience, “Without getting paid extra for it, Don wrote online textbooks for several of our courses so our students would have a no-cost resource to help them learn the material.
“He made an online learning management system for his classes. It allowed students to submit homework, view their scores, and receive feedback on their work. Nowadays we take that functionality for granted through commercial systems like Canvas. But Don’s students had all that functionality long before anyone had ever heard of Canvas.”
Besides textbooks and the learning management system, Colton has helped all BYUH students through his creation of MAPPER. Martha Christensen, academic advisor for business management majors, said Don would take her suggestions when developing MAPPER. “Sometimes he’d do it there on the spot. I had a lot of ideas, so I would constantly bug him.”
James Lee, dean of the College of Business, Computing and Government, said, “Don has been my department chair and I’ve been his. Don is very kind because even though he didn’t always agree on how I ran things, he never said anything. He never forced his ideas on me, but was always a great resource.”
Chris Slade, a computer science major of 8 years, said the Coltons “like to have fun and are very service oriented. When there are parades, they offer water at their house. They invite kids to play with their train sets around Christmastime. They are always doing nice stuff people wouldn’t think about.”
Christensen said, “They have lots of parties at their house. They are friendly, welcoming people.”
Lee added, “They are the potluck queen and king of Laie.”
Slade said, “I don’t think the CIS program would be here without him. He’s weathered the storms of the CIS department and survived.”
Draper remembered, “Don is the institutional memory of our department.
Whenever we have questions about why a certain policy is the way it is, Don can recall the history behind it. I’ll miss having him as a ready resource in department meetings.”