Frontiers of Technology
Frontiers of Technology was a brand new and interesting honors seminar. The idea behind the class was to learn about different technologies and lessons within water and energy. We learned various things about the technologies and different areas within each respective field. Then we were able to discover and address problems, discussions, and presentations about the technology. The class was geared towards creating a way to teach non-technical students about technology within water and energy in a high-level and efficient way. This purpose was consistently addressed with the presentations we gave and the projects we took on. Everything was geared to prepare us for our final presentations.
We were broken up at the beginning into 3 groups: Water, Energy, and Water + Energy. My group was the water + energy group. We worked on all the assignments together throughout the semester. At the end, we were challenged with a project to create a presentation of a lesson plan for a 4 week course to teach non-technical students about water + energy technology such as hydroelectric power and solar thermal energy. We laid out a syllabus, week by week breakdown, assignments, and guest speaker suggestions for topics. We also included a separate portion within the presentation on 4 innovative ideas within water and energy. My innovative idea was a cylindrical building with a funnel shaped room that would use rain water that ran through a pipe in the middle to turn a turbine to generate energy.
Overall, I was really able to dive into some really unique lessons on technology within water and energy. The class provided me perspective on not only how to learn about these technologies, but also teach these technologies to other students in return. This made me think a lot differently about the material we learned and how to address both learning and teaching. It was a good way to learn because I believe there is a huge correlation between learning the knowledge and actually teaching it. Teachers tend to actually absorb the knowledge and have to be able to share that with the students. In short, it was really awesome to realize that teachers are the best learners.
We were broken up at the beginning into 3 groups: Water, Energy, and Water + Energy. My group was the water + energy group. We worked on all the assignments together throughout the semester. At the end, we were challenged with a project to create a presentation of a lesson plan for a 4 week course to teach non-technical students about water + energy technology such as hydroelectric power and solar thermal energy. We laid out a syllabus, week by week breakdown, assignments, and guest speaker suggestions for topics. We also included a separate portion within the presentation on 4 innovative ideas within water and energy. My innovative idea was a cylindrical building with a funnel shaped room that would use rain water that ran through a pipe in the middle to turn a turbine to generate energy.
Overall, I was really able to dive into some really unique lessons on technology within water and energy. The class provided me perspective on not only how to learn about these technologies, but also teach these technologies to other students in return. This made me think a lot differently about the material we learned and how to address both learning and teaching. It was a good way to learn because I believe there is a huge correlation between learning the knowledge and actually teaching it. Teachers tend to actually absorb the knowledge and have to be able to share that with the students. In short, it was really awesome to realize that teachers are the best learners.