When I first read that this would be over an hour long video, I was disappointed. I did not really want to sit and hear someone lecture for over an hour about teaching. Well I quickly took my foot out of my mouth after I listened and watched this video. Randy Pausch's Last Lecture was astounding. His presentation was organized and far from boring. I can appreciate his drive and determination to develop a curriculum and have it being used arounf the country. Also, he took it a step further with is computer program, Alice. He made me realize that experimenting can lead to great things and achieving your childhood dream is even better.
Mr. Pausch had many dreams as a child and he was able to live out one of them as an imagineer. He took what he lesrned and asked himself, "How can I anable the childhood dreams of others?" Soon after he asked himself this question, he was approached by a student named Tommy who said that it was his childhood dream to work on the next Star Wars movie. Mr. Pausch created a course called Building Virtual Worlds. Initially, 50 students were selected from different departments at the university. The students were randomly put into teams of 4 which changed per project. There were a total of 15 projects per semester.
Randy Pausch allowed his students to do their first project on whatever because it was new to him too.
Teachers never stop learning and it may surprise some of you but teachers learn from their students as Mr. Pausch did. What his students produced amazed him mostly because the equipment was poor. Since his students made something out of nothing he did not know what to do. He was told to not set a bar because this will allow their imaginations to run wild. I liked this concept because when you praise your students so much as if they did the best they could, there is a chance that they could be hindered because they believe they did the best they could. Not setting a standard or a bar is a positive. However, I can see where this could be a bad idea also because some students may not produce the very best they can. It all depends on the students in my opinion.
I was blown away by the Hello World project. I think it was very creative and looked fun. His classes presented their work to the public. They were able to get other people excited about the projects. Parent participation in college?!!! It takes a pretty good professor to make that happen. In my opinion, if you get the students excited enough about what they are learning and what they are doing, then they will get their parents or guardians more excited and involved. You have parent participation and you also have the participation of the audience. I never knew there was technology out there that allowed the audience to be involved at a movie theater. That is awesome! He made a very good point about the class being a bonding experience. The face that you have to work with different people every two weeks gets even the shyest person to brighten up. Same should be done in public schools. Teachers should have activities where students bond with each other. They will not even know what is going on and by the time they figure it out, they will have made more friends than they would have on their own.
His course was project-based only. He did not find the need in having students purchase books because he felt they had read enough in their undergrad. I do not believe it is possible to go without books in elementary and secondary schools but it is possible to have more projects, mostly group projects, in the classroom. This teaches students how to work with other people because whether the y will want to or not, they will have to work with other people in the future at their job. I appreciated how he had students rate each other's "easiness to work with" individually in the group. People found out if they were a jerk to work with or a pleasure to work with. It helped his students "to become self-reflective." Those who cared, realized that they may need to change how the talk to other people.
"Kids having fun while learning something hard." This was his legacy and I can respect that. If we as instructors and future instructors can present the information to our students in a way that while they are learning, they are not bothered by the difficulty of the material because they are having fun. If they are having fun while doing the work, then they will hunger for more. Come on my fellow educators out there. We have to make the material more fun in order to keep our students focused and engaged in the classrooms.
Since then, Tommy, our student whose childhood dream was to work on the set of the next Star Wars, has worked on all three of the Star Wars films.
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