David Kelly (the "IDEO guy") on Human Centered Design

This is ten years old so I'm not sure how good it is... what do you think?

Wow...

The Engineering Projects course is going to be focused on developing a UAV next year. These UAVs being developed at University of Pennsylvania are mindblowing!:

Whistle While You Work

Theme music for our in class "10 Minute Design-Build Challenges"!:

Monski Pong!

Niki has integrated some flex sensors (resistors) with an Arduino to control a straightforward "Pong" style game. Nice!:

"Fail Early, Fail Often"

You all have heard me say this a lot lately. Don't take my word for it, here's some data from the Marshmallow Challenge:




We've done a lot of "Design-Build" challenges in our classes, should we give this one a go?

Here's a screenshot from the video that cuts to the heart of the issue. If each marshmallow from the diagram is an attempt, why is it that the Kindergartner's end result consistently outperform MBA students by more than 100%?:

#4!!!

"In the history of space flight, only four entities have launched a space capsule into orbit and successfully brought it back to earth..."

Who is Elon Musk? Why should you care?



?- What is Entrepreneurship?

?- How close did Space X come to failing?

?- Describe a moment where Elon's resilience played a role in the company persevering with their efforts.

?- Describe a problem that the Space X team overcame.

Paradigm Shift

The challenge:



A solution:



Choose a video from the Khan Academy that is relevant to your current course load (for instance some students were talking about a Chemistry test so maybe something related to that?).

Provide "sustain" (positive) and "change" feedback regarding your experience with using the video to supplement your learning.

"Sustain" - what works well for you with the video you chose?

"Change" - Is there anything you would change regarding the video or the concept of "flipping the classroom".

In your opinion, could "flipping the classroom" work out? Should education institutions work towards this new paradigm?

Post the video you watched and your feedback to the above questions in a post on your blog. Thanks!

STUXNET

Smartest Machine on Earth

The video players only show one chapter of an episode at a time. For a better viewing experience use the hotlink beneath each player to open up the full episode on the PBS website. Otherwise you'll have to click through five or six times during the viewing to see the whole episode.

Watch Smartest Machine on Earth on PBS. See more from NOVA.

What is "machine learning"?

How did the IBM team employ that concept in the development of Watson's AI? What advantage did that provide over previous attempts at "intelligence"?

I've often mentioned the term "Empirical Scepticism". What does that mean? How does that relate to the concept of Machine Learning? How does this relate to your life?

Power Surge

Watch Power Surge on PBS. See more from NOVA.

Engineering Ground Zero

The video players only show one chapter of an episode at a time. For a better viewing experience use the hotlink beneath each player to open up the full episode on the PBS website. Otherwise you'll have to click through five or six times during the viewing to see the whole episode.

Watch Engineering Ground Zero on PBS. See more from NOVA.

What different "trades" (types of construction work) are featured in this video? Name at least three.

What aspect of the project is most interesting to you? Why is that?

(as a side note, look for the steel cable that breaks at just after the 4 minute mark... yeow! that could take a limb off)

Car of the Future

The video players only show one chapter of an episode at a time. For a better viewing experience use the hotlink beneath each player to open up the full episode on the PBS website. Otherwise you'll have to click through five or six times during the viewing to see the whole episode.

Watch Car of the Future on PBS. See more from NOVA.

The above video window only plays the first chapter of the program.
Click through here to watch the whole video uninterupted!

Discussion
So what is the car of the future? In other words, what appears to be the most promising technology explored by Click and Clack? Justify your response.

What fields of study/work would support the development of the car of the future. Describe two different ones.

Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger

Welcome to the NOVA "Making Stuff" series hosted by David Pouge. It spans four episodes that focus on making stuff Stronger, Smaller, Cleaner and Smarter respectively. These shows aired about a year ago so they're still quite "fresh".

The video players only show one chapter of an episode at a time. For a better viewing experience use the hotlink beneath each player to open up the full episode on the PBS website. Otherwise you'll have to click through five or six times during the viewing to see the whole episode.

Watch Making Stuff: Stronger on PBS. See more from NOVA.

Watch Making Stuff: Smaller on PBS. See more from NOVA.

Watch Making Stuff: Cleaner on PBS. See more from NOVA.

Watch Making Stuff: Smarter on PBS. See more from NOVA.

Binary Counting

This is a neat video that Dan shared with me. Digital data ultimately is a series of 1s and 0s. We had talked about this in a few of our classes and this video can help you visualize a counting system based on switches:

"Cooperate and Graduate"

We've been spending a lot of time in our Engineering Design sections working on team based technical drawing quizes. Learning to work with colleagues is an important career skill. Here's a clip from tonight's 60 minutes that backs me up.





This is a CBS/60 Minutes video so please excuse any advertisements the player forces you to watch...

7 Billion Chances to Make a Difference!

It's theorized that the human population reached 7 Billion today. That's a lot of opportunties to design/build solutions to problems.

? - As you move forward in your life, what are some of the challenges listed in the following video that you could participate in solving?



a

? - 7 Billion is a huge number. How can we conceptualize that many people? How many people live in San Diego? How many San Diegos is 7 Billion?

I *Heart* the 80's!

It's "80's day" today at CHS...

There was a lot of memorable music from the era. I know that's a little before your time but do you have a favorite band or album from the period?

Here's a selection of classic 80's music to get the day going with:

"If Today Were the Last Day of My Life...

...would I want to do what what I'm about to do today?"

Promoting technical leadership is at the core of our Creative Problem solver experience. In memory of Steve Jobs, one of the nation's premier innovators, ever, let's hear what some are claiming as the "Gettysburg Address" of commencement speaches:



? - What three things from this talk resonate deepest with you? List each of these and give a breif explanation of why they are meaningful to you.

"I'm Sorry Dave, I'm Afraid I Can't Do That..."

This is a follow on for when we get back to programming next. We can continue from where we were with our "Hello World!" C++ program and modify it to replicate the best artificial intelligence that our space program can buy.

Challenge:
Craft a program that functions like the frustratingly perfect HAL 9000 from Stanly Kubric's seminal movie 2001.

Specifically:
(1pt) - Prompt the user to enter their name (see tips below)
(1pt) - Ask the user what they'd like to have HAL 9000 do and always reply with "I'm sorry (name entered), I'm afraid I can't do that"






A few thoughts that might help out:

Google C++ cin to understand how you can use the cin command to input text.

Before the main () function with the other #include place the following:
#include <string>

Inside the main () function you could use the following:
string user_input; //creates a string (text) variable named "user_input"
getline(cin, user_input); //the getline function can be used to enter a string (text) for the user_input variable

Harder, Better, Faster... Smaller?

Making Things Smaller. Part 2 of the Making Things series from NOVA:

Watch the full episode. See more NOVA.