Class Review

Hello everyone that normally follows my blogs, I know that I took longer than expected this time. I have just been bad at managing my time lately, I have to work more on that. Well in this blog I’m gonna be talking about ken’s course and this new method of LEARNING not teaching. Let me just start off by saying that I loved it and I wish more everybody else was doing it too. Of course not exactly the same because every course needs it’s own special way. I mean programming at this level is something that you can pretty much do by yourself but physics, math and chemistry maybe is so easy. For example the video below is a perfect demonstration on what ken’s doing with us in his class. It is not exactly the same but it is very very similar. I guess the big difference would be that he does give us any specific video to watch, he just expects us to learn at home but during class he is always there to help, so that part is the same.

I was skeptical about this course at first I even went to see ken at his office to tell him that I was a bit worried about how things were gonna go. He told it would be fine and I guess I trusted him. Even though ken didn’t really lecture us on anything rather than asked us to make new programs and to find out how to do them on our own, I learned so much about programming and social networking. I used to hate asking anybody, other than the teacher, for help. Now I see that it is even better to learn with your classmates instead of by yourself. Now before I talk about the things

learned to do I would like to talk about traditional students and traditional methods of learning.

Over the years I have watched my classmates behave differently towards the professor, being the professor’s lectures always of the same style, students came to become less interested over the years in what the profesor said at the whiteboard. I have studied in USA and in Mexico and honestly students react the same way to the traditional method of teaching. Of course not all students are the same, I saw some students that actually wanted to learn and payed attention. I feel that most students in school today care more about getting a grade, or worse passing the class, than actually learning. I don’t blame them. I mean that is what we are used to, Over the years your teachers have enforced the idea of getting good grades. But that is garbage I know first hand that a grade does not determine how much you have learned in a class. I recall history classes that I aced but a barely remember a thing about that class and on the other hand I remember acing my physics class and to this day I still have that knowledge. I think that the secret to really learning is wanting more knowledge. I think it is a terrible idea to have the knowledge enforced on you.

The flipped learning method is a great idea a to get students to learn in a much more efficient manner. Some People are scared at first but if they want to learn they get over it. Others do nothing in the whole course, so they learn nothing and of course they don’t like this method of learning, they don’t want to think to much, they just want to do what the professor says (barely) so that they can pass the class. Well  with flipped learning you can’t advance unless you take action. ken taught us how to find and use information by ourselves so that we don’t have to depend completely on a teacher to learn things. I personally learned how to do many things in this course. And the things I learned aren’t even on the mastery list for this course.

The first thing I want to show you guys is this link.

Project Wireless Communication  in this blog I explain how I learned to program a PIC and use it for a life application. I’m trying to build a small and economic car immobilizer. So far I am making big progress. The next step is to pass the circuits on tho an etching board and test the product on a car.

I also learned how to make a cool classic snake game in the video I’ll show you a little demonstration. And I think the hardest program That I made was with data analysis. For my statics class I had to make a Hydraulic crane and I had no idea what dimensions would be the best for the system to work. So I made a program that is a simulation that analyzes all the data and calculates the different moments generated in the crane to see which dimensions are optimal for it to function properly. And a video just to close things up, enjoy. Oh almost forgot about the code:

Crane.cpp

made by Orlando Lara

CC BY-SA 4.0 Class Review by Orlando Lara is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.