Monday, May 11, 2015

Porch Couch

Howdy Campers

I give you porch couch. The magnificent and glorious addition to our small deck of nothingness. After multiple hours of planning and one, HUGE, Home depot run. We built this monstrosity.

Pretty sweet right?

Yeah.

-Max

Teaching Assistant for ECEN 1400

Howdy Campers,

Its been a while since my last post, and by that I mean a full year. So lets get to it.

During the fall semester of my Junior year, I was fortunate enough to be a Teaching Assistant for an introductory electrical course. The course, which is frequently said to be a weeder class for the ECEN department, was Introduction to Digital and Analog Electronics.

The content of the class was fairly simple by upper division standards, but could be very challenging to students who came into the major with little to no experience with circuits. I vividly remember pouring hours into this class my freshman year, despite having previous experience as an electrical hobbyist. The final project alone took over 120 hours to complete.

Now, as an upperclassman, I was tasked with assisting in the underclassmen's learning experience. My goal for the semester was to A) Learn how to teach,  and B) Make the "weeder" class as easy to follow as I could.

The first goal proved to be more difficult. I had come to realize that understanding the material, and conveying the material in a simple and elegant way, were two related, yet difficult to connect disciplines. After talking to the professor of the class and TA's of other classes, I compiled a strategy for teaching. Teaching mainly occurred during the lab hours, so I would continuously walk around the lab, asking questions when people looked like they were stuck. If they were having trouble answering, I would simplify the questions to relate to what they were learning in the classroom. If that didn't work, I either used a whiteboard to diagram the solution, or assisted them in producing the correct result.

A difficulty that faced this particular course was the clarity of documents. On noticing this challenge that students had to overcome, I took it upon myself to rewrite the majority of class documents and labs in LaTex. Not only did this help the current students, it would help students in future classes.

By the end of the semester, I was amazed at the improvement of students. They started not understanding the basic working of circuits and finished by designing full logic clocks on printed circuit boards. Most of them even worked!

Overall, my experience as a teaching assistant for Introduction to Digital and Analog Electronics was a positive one. I gained knowledge in areas where there was none, and began to understand the difficult job professors have to teach mind boggling concepts in a single semester.

-John "The second time around was easier" Dunn