Daniel Braley

I found that the learning through teaching project is very good way to introduce students to the teaching process. Being the only one in my group that had previously been exposed to FEM, I had to first teach my group the basics of FEM. This was an interesting process. I remember when Dr. Shet, my FEM professor, first introduced the concepts to the FEM class. We were kind of lost. Now I had to teach my group and make sure they understood everything about the material. After successfully teaching the basics to my group, we had to turn and teach the material to the rest of the class, through a presentation. This was a good experience for gaining more presentation practice or experience, and allowed me to get evaluated on the way that I present the material. When the class is confused, is when I know that I didn’t make something as clear as I originally thought I might have.

This gave me a good perspective on how good I am at presenting material that I may not fully understand. In a sense, I think that by having people teach a subject they don’t necessarily know very well, this project is breaking the rule of academia, in that professors teaching a subject have to be very knowledgeable in that subject, in order to be effective to the class. I don’t feel it is beneficial to the class to have inexperienced people teach a subject that they will be tested on later. However, the project did provide an introduction to teaching to each student, and this was a good experience in that sense.

Heriberto Cortes

I believe that learning through teaching is a good and positive way to teach material to a student. Learning through teaching made me see many things that I had no clue of before. I was not very knowledgeable on how to present a proper presentation or what to expect when presenting to a class. Learning through teaching showed me this in two ways one was through the guidance of a group member that has presented before and also by presenting myself. Through my learning through teaching experience I also had to learn the FEM material to teach to the class. This was done by reading about FEM and also by the help of my group member that was learning FEM at the same time that we were preparing for the presentation. Having to do this gave me great respect for what teachers have to go through to teach students. Having to make presentation and make sure their understanding of the material is good enough to the various questions that students are going to answer. All together I think the learning through teaching is a good method of teaching students a subject because the have to have a greater understand of the subject to be able to present it to a class.

Adam Hollrith

My learning-through-teaching experience was very positive. It introduced to me a new method of learning in which I was forced to be an active participant. In most of my previous educational experiences from elementary school and onward, learning has been a primarily passive activity with the exception of some research projects. On the whole however, my education has consisted of absorbing as much material possible that a teacher has presented. The learning-through-teaching experience allowed for a deeper understanding through an active learning process rather than the usual passive methods encountered in most classes.

Furthermore, this project has tremendously helped my experience in presentations. I now better understand how to prepare a presentation and I have gained valuable experience in making the presentation. The most important thing I learned in presenting was that the material should be presented in a logically flowing manner and that it is more important to teach the fundamental concepts rather than get wrapped up in more specific details.

Overall, the learning-through-teaching assignment has proven to be very valuable experience. It has helped me realize that I need to take a more active role in learning. In addition, I feel that I will be better prepared to plan and conduct presentations in the future. I would strongly recommend this type of assignment to anyone who wants to gain a deeper understanding of any subject.