February 27, 2014

For the first half hour, I shadowed Ming. Ming decided to go over some intern questions and see if I can answer most of them. I am still learning  how to address certain issues. I feel that going over questions like these will help me when I become a Senior Consultant. I will be prepared to address the common issues and get an understanding of how to address rare situations.

For the last half hour, Parth took me to the Teaching, Learning Lab or the TLT Media Lab. There I met Paul St. Denis who was in charge. He was very excited to see me and showed me the various projects they were working on. These projects were created by Paul’s interns. I thought it was very cool because I get to see what students on campus are working on. This made me extremely excited because I am a big fan of technology and education. I love learning things through the computer and if someone makes it fun and interesting, I know for a fact that I will learn something.

The first thing they showed me was a white cube with projections on it. The goal of that project was to create a way for students and professors a like to view objects in 3-D. These objects may include organic molecules, protein structures, amino acids, etc. Paul continued to tell me what they were aiming to do with this project. Since this was requested by a faculty member in the science field, Paul wanted to create a way so that if you turn the cube, the object projected on it will turn as well. Isn’t that cool? I thought so. If someone was able to create a device to help view the 3-D structure of a molecule, this will make biology classes more interesting and will allow students to understand what active sites a professor is talking about.

The next project was a game involving a centrifuge. It was in a game format and very simple to play. It aims to teach whoever is playing it the fundamentals of using a centrifuge, one of it is to make sure the centrifuge is balanced or it will not work properly, or even worse, break. I think this will help middle school students more than college students. The centrifuge is very easy to use as long as it is being used correctly. However, I thought this was an interesting project because it is so basic. It helps anyone who plays it understand that if the centrifuge is unbalanced, it will not work.

It was a productive day as I got to meet other faculty members and find out what they are doing with their interns. I really enjoyed my time in the TLT Media Lab.