Practicing Your Knowledge

For this weeks blog post I was to identify and attempt a hands-on experience. The past couple of weeks I have had the privilege to work on a engineering project with our group to build a device that would explain, to a visually impaired person, why a ladder will not slide when force is put upon it. Our group brain stormed ideas to see what would work best to explain the idea behind it. Our group chose to create a small replica of a wall, flat surface, and a ladder. The flat surface would have two different types of friction on it, one side with sand paper and the other with nothing at all. The building process took up to a week or so to finally come up with a compact friendly design that the visually impaired person can carry around with themselves. This project really opened up my eyes as a engineer and to see what I am really capable to doing in the futre. A simple thing like building a device to showcase friction, is mind blowing to me because of how powerful the mind is when thinking about different possible ideas.

This whole hands on project gave me a new perspective. There is quite the difference between a hands-on learning and learning from written/ spoken sources. Hands-on learning allowed me to be able to freely think about how I can approach the project. The big thing was the ability for me to use trial and error. This allowed our group to learn about what would be best for the customer. Learning from written sources on the other hand makes the reader have to interpret another persons ideas to see what is best fit for the certain situation. Written sources also gives you the ability to look at a different perspective from another person. There are always pros and cons of hands-on learning and from written/ spoken sources. It really just depends on how the person approaches the project to see what best fits for them at that certain time.

After attempting a hands-on experience that allowed me to learn more about my field, I felt that it is more beneficial for me to physically see what is going on in action. As a hands-on type student if I am able to see what I need to do on a project I can better asess the situation. For this experience it was much better to be hands on than trying to learn from written/spoken sources. There will be times that it is more beneficial to learn from written/spoken sources, but for this engineering project it was best to physically be hands-on with the building process. This allowed me to learn more about the project as a whole and understand the problem that I needed to solve.