Course Connections and our Personal Reflections

The courses that w have been exposed to thus far in the Technology Education program have given us a well-rounded perspective on many of the aspects that were discussed in his article. Although as a collective we are all students in the Technology Education program, we all come from very different backgrounds and fields of study. For those of us who studied mathematics and science, we are very familiar with the natural sciences and the ideas of how something ought to be as guided by the parameters of our field of study. This shift in thinking may look quite different for students versed in Literature for instance. This program has introduced us to the ideas of engineering sciences, and the ideas of functionality. This was very prominent in the Design and Fabrication course that we took over this summer. We were able to create a product that met the requirements of the course; but actually had a function that was important for each of us.

Our final project in response to a design problem for Education 2750: Teaching Design and Materials Processing (from conceptualization to final artifact).

In our Robotics 4752 course, modeling is a key component of our learning process. We have been given the opportunity to construct a functioning ROV throughout the duration of the course. Prior to creating the final product, we created a decision matrix to aide us in deciding what we valued as important to our ROV. This led us to create a cardboard prototype so that we had the ability to examine the potential size of the ROV and how each of the components would fit together.

This type of modeling is important not only to our own studies, but to the learning experiences of our future students. They will get the opportunity to learn what each component actually has to contribute to the overall design and by examining the model, understand what the actual functionality of the ROV and the components are.

Gripper Test 1.mp4