I’ve had several opportunities in the past couple years to try teaching undergraduate students. While I do get some presentation anxiety, I think I’m quite good at it, and I find it really fulfilling. The feedback I’ve received has always been heartwarming (scroll to the bottom to see the student evaluations), and while I wouldn’t want it to be my primary role, I welcome opportunities to do it on the side.
PBSI Workshops
In November 2018, I delivered a workshop to a group of interdisciplinary students from TU Delft at the Delft Science Centre. The workshop was centred on building an interactive sculpture with PBSI’s form language and electronics system.
I led both the electronics/mechanisms group and the software/behaviour group. I taught the former how to use our hardware system and how to integrate their own devices. With the latter, we developed a behaviour system that used sensor readings to produce a local reaction followed by some chained neighbour behaviours through an MQTT network.
The workshop was very successful, culminating in a small exhibition and setting the foundation for an extended relationship with the university and Science Centre.
In November 2022, exactly 4 years into my position with PBSI, I returned for a second workshop. This workshop was a huge step forward for the engineering systems because it was the first ‘field test’ of our new system architecture.
Like in 2018, the workshop was a combination of teaching students and then building a small testbed. I gave a presentation on how we designed our electronics and mechanisms, taught students how to build our assemblies, and lead them in some open-ended design exploration.
ARCH510 2021 and 2022
In 2021 and 2022 I guest lectured for a graduate architecture course titled “Reactor Cells: Introduction to Interactive Systems”. At PBSI we developed classroom kits using our sculpture electronics and software toolkit, and in these courses I taught students how to use them. The course has been very successful, receiving tremendously positive feedback in both years.
Here’s an example of the type of system we would help them build using our ESP32 Breakout Board, a photoresistor sensor, an LED actuator, and a servo.
When you distrub the system by shining a light on the sensor, it wakes up, plays a pattern on its LED, and spins the servo a slightly randomized. The LED is pointed at the photoresistor, and will re-trigger this loop unless the paper flag is blocking it. Because of the small amount of RNG in the servo profile’s parameters, it stops at a slightly different position after each cycle, potentially blocking the LED—>photoresistor path. So sometimes the loop retriggers itself and sometimes it doesn’t.
So in essence, we’ve created a creature that wakes up (by shining a flashlight on the sensor), lives a short life, and then puts itself back to sleep after some number of cycles (sometimes just one, sometimes dozens).
APS100 2017
In my 4th year of undergrad I worked as a teaching assistant for a first year course titled “Orientation to Engineering”. The course was brand new, and was intended to help students transition into university and help them make more informed decisions about their program and career. It was primarily taught by the teaching assistants because we were able to teach in smaller groups and were more relatable to the students, having been in their shoes just a couple years prior. We covered topics including time management, stress management, study skills, and how the different engineering disciplines applied their knowledge.
I taught a group of general first year engineering students, the same program I enrolled in. Like me, a lot of the students knew they liked STEM from their high school courses or because that’s what one of their parents did, but they weren’t sure what type of engineering was best for them. I personally had a lot of difficulty choosing my specialization, so I wanted to help new students make more informed decisions.
The course went extremely well - I got a ton of great feedback from my students (see my class’ course evaluations below for proof!), and I found that I really enjoyed teaching.