Blog # 7

What Can We Learn About Teaching and Learning From Randy Pausch? When I watched the Video by Randy Pausch, I was quite impressed with his teaching and learning strategies. I learned a lot of information from him but the one thing out of the whole video that stuck with me was the Brick Wall how he described it. A brick wall shows dedication in life. Here are some pointers from Randy himself:

- Don't bail; the best gold is at the bottom of the Barrels crap - Get a feed back loop; listen to it!!! - Show Gratitude - Don't complain; just work harder More Advice - Be good at something; it makes you valuable - Work hard.... "What's your secret?" - Find the best in everybody; no matter how you have to wait for them to show it - Be prepared "luck" is where preparation meets opportunity Randy talked about imagination and talked about a project called Aladdin and when he was a kid he wanted to fly the magic carpet, instead he cleaned the head caps. Then he talked about Charlie and the Chocolate factory and he heard someone tell him "Did you ever hear about the little boy who suddenly got everything he ever wanted?" and he said "No what happened!!" and the guy said "He lived happily ever after." Randy other childhood dreams were the Virtual Jungle Cruise and also the Pirates of the Caribbean. How do you enable your childhood dreams? Tommy Brunet said I have a childhood dream "Tommy wants to work on the next star wars movie around 1993." Randy and Tommy both created a program called "Building Virtual Worlds" which contained:

- 50 Students drawn from different departments at the University - Randomly chosen them (4 people per team) - 2 weeks to design each project - 5 projects through the whole semester What amazed Randy is that the groups finished their projects early and the professor didn't know what to do so he had to call his mentor and ask "What do I do?" His mentor said "To go back and tell the student's that you all did a good job but you can do better" and sure enough it worked. Hello world was the team project they designed a virtual program that a person creates a world with imaginary animals. There was one animals that always appeared a bunny and the bunny didn't want the student who was controlling the world do quit their world so the students just hit Control alt delete to go away. There was another project that Randy and Don Marinelli created called The Dream fulfillment factory. ETC (Entertaining Technology Center) - Artists and technologists working in small teams to make things - 2 year professional degree (MET): Masters of Entertainment technology) - Two kindred spirits: try things a new way - Don gets most of the credit for the success of ETC The main success from ETC: Focus on people and learning to work in groups Another program that they worked on was Alice: - Its a novel way to teach computer programming - Kids make movies and games the "head fake" is that they are learning to program - Over 1 million downloads, 8 textbooks and 10% of colleges use right now Lessons learned - The role of parents, mentors and students There are also other people that help us as well: - Teachers - Friends - Mentors - Colleagues Loyalty is a two-way street How do you get people to help you?

- You can't get there alone; Randy believes in Karma - Tell the truth - Be earnest - Apologize when you screw up - Focus on others not yourself Overview of the video - Randy's childhood Dreams - Enabling dreams of others - Lesson's learned: How you can achieve your dreams or enable the dreams of others Lastly its not how you achieve you dreams its how to lead your life. Here is the video of Randy's Speech