Post #7

Randy Pausch's Last Lecture

Pausch's lecture is by far my favorite thing we have been assigned. I really enjoyed hearing his stories and his views on different aspects of life. He talks about teaching and learning and shows how project based learning has been effective. Seeing how his small project exploded into a huge, university-wide event gave me a better idea of how important it is to allow students to use their creativeness to learn.

In his last lecture before his death, he divulges his methods of teaching at Carnegie-Mellon. He began a class called Building Virtual Worlds in which fifty students were broken into groups of four and completed five projects dealing with virtual reality. Not fully knowing what to expect from his students, Pausch was blown away with their performance on the first project. This teaches us to never underestimate our students and shows that when we give freedom of creativity, students will almost always surprise us. Another important point from this particular story is that when Pausch didn't know what to do, he called his mentor. It is so important to have those with more experience to call on and ask for advice. This goes along with building a personal learning network like we have discussed earlier. Randy makes the statement, "Get a feedback loop and listen to it." In order to teach more effectively, we must get feedback from students, parents, and our own peers.

The reoccurring theme in randy Pausch's last lecture is the "head fake." A head fake is where you accomplish an underlying goal through working at another goal on the surface. He used this method repeatedly in his own teaching and it is the basis of the Alice Project. The Alice Project teaches students how to program while they think they are just creating animation and playing interactive games. Teaching students something hard by having fun is an extraordinary concept and should be employed in every classroom. As teachers, we can get students much more engaged and excited about difficult concepts and projects.

Randy talks about learning from your students. When you allow freedom of creativity, you will not always get what you expect and you may not always get what you want. Pausch says, "experience is what you get when you didn't get what you wanted." This statement holds true in the classroom. If a project doesn't work as well as planned, learn from it and make changes. As teachers in a project based learning environment, we must be flexible and willing to improve our methods based on our students.