Blog - Year - 2012

The average undergraduate today has been learning in front of a screen and typing away at a keypad since early childhood. "I do remember when we still could choose between turning in a typed paper and a handwritten one," says junior Mifa Kim. Yet, most students have never experienced a...

The following theses come out of my experience with a faculty seminar at CU Boulder on the subject of Teaching with Technology sponsored by Arts and Sciences Support of Education Through Technology (ASSETT). I do not claim any sort of comprehensiveness nor exhaustiveness. There are further things to be said...

What would you learn if you could turn off the atmosphere? What problems might you solve if you could increase the force of gravity or had the ability to manipulate individual electrons in a circuit? Demonstrations and experiments have long been an important tool in science education, yet real-world limitations...

As freshmen at CU, Bryce Eaton and Natalie Rechter expected the usual challenges. Leaving high school for college means navigating an entirely new social atmosphere, succeeding in classes like Classical Mechanics and Mathematical Methods, and learning to accept (or ignore) the various eccentricities of new roommates. However, there was one...

He was never a good student. Bored in the classroom, he would rarely raise his hand, shuffling reluctantly from class to class, obviously unengaged. When his middle school offered a game design class he enrolled apprehensively, but the prospect of building his own game piqued his interest. By mid-semester he...

Teaching With Technology, Fall 2012 Photograph by Nigora Azimova Each semester, a small group of CU professors who share a passion for experimenting with technology hold regular meetings in the Technology Learning Center, sometimes with a large plate of pastries and often with laptops and iPads in hand. This semester's...

"I don't think it's my job to make students come to class," says Dr. Ingrid Ulbrich, chemistry instructor at CU Boulder. Nor does she think it important to take attendance, though she cares deeply about her student's success. During the spring and summer of 2012, Dr. Ulbrich used Lecture Capture...

Whether we are standing, walking or running, the force we exert on the ground mediates all our bodily movements. Measuring this force was a considerably difficult process, but now an easier and cheaper system exists through employing a Nintendo Wii Balance Board. Alaa Ahmed, an Assistant Professor in the department...

"I've been gaming since I was a little kid", brags Trent Begin, a TTA at ASSETT. "Well I was playing Flight Simulator", says TTA Casey Zahorik, pausing dramatically as he leans back in his swivel chair, when I was three years old . Grant Matheny, ASSETT's technical director, laughs and...

“You’re doing it right when you’re playing,” says Dr. Amma Ghartey-Tagoe Kootin. This may seem like a strange statement to make in an upper-level class where students use complex technology and challenging archival material to re-imagine the 1901 New York World’s Fair on stage. Yet, Dr. Ghartey-Tagoe Kootin’s Spring 2012...