Tuesday, January 8, 2013

YouTube PhD Projects

We're taking mostly the same classes at the moment, the basic classes for Engineering Education (ENE). This is a very interesting department, filled with all kinds of people from very diverse backgrounds. Engineering Education wasn't something you could get a degree in until Purdue started its School of Engineering Education in 2004. Due to how young the program is, the wide-ranging interests of the faculty, the wide-open nature of what you do with a degree in this area, and the fact that we're being trained to have not just a research interest but also an ability to discuss with the public and influence policy, we get some interesting program requirements and projects.

Towards some of those desired outcomes, one of our recent class projects was to work in a group and create a YouTube video on the topic(s) of engineering and engineering education. Ana's is more informative and authoritative, while Lee's is,well, less so, but more fun.

First up, Ana's, a voice-over presentation that starts a bit slow and is geared towards high schoolers considering engineering or undergraduate students who aren't yet sure about this whole engineering thing:


Yes, Ana is the voice-over (Lee - and she did it in one continuous take)

Next, Lee's. His team wanted something memorable and funny that would have a chance of going viral amongst technical faculty, and went a bit lighter on the historical and philosophical elements.  His group cut down and re-captioned an Iron Chef episode and made one of the funniest things this department has ever seen, though some of the jokes are technical or specific to engineering education. Make sure you turn captions on if they aren't on already! If you're not sure what to do, click the square in the bottom-right corner of the video, then click on the "CC" button in the bottom-right corner. Even if you understand the Japanese, that is not what the captions say at all!

 
 Amazing, no?

Many people in the department said the Iron Prof video was probably one of the best videos in the five years they've been doing this project.  Faculty may have cried with laughter at the presentation. If you want to take a look at some more such videos, the entire list of all of the ENE videos can be found here.

The third and final YouTube video we're presenting here is from some students in a section of Honors First-Year Engineering that Lee is a part of teaching (about the Honors First-Year Engineering program he is a part of teaching), and was not done for this or any other assigned project. We think it is pretty funny as well, and put it in for your enjoyment.  Note from Lee - in my professional opinion, the class they are singing about is in fact brutally difficult and life-consuming, as it is intended to be.  They are learning so much, and are really great students that are generally a pleasure to work with.  Apparently, some can also sing.



As a final note - this is not what we do all day.  Mostly we read, write, and discuss research papers.  YouTube is not yet a professionally acceptable mode of publication for scientific discourse.  Comments that we're going to school to make internet videos may result in you being forced to read our recent literature reviews on the topics of extant K-12 engineering design cycles and the uses of intelligent tutoring systems for engineering education.  They are pretty dry.  You have been warned.


 

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