Category: Education Page 16 of 18

Electrical Engineering 200 – Signals, Circuits, and Systems

By Dad

On Friday, September 14, 2012

In Education, Homeschool, Technology

Day 390 of 1000

Christian's cool stuff for his Electrical Engineering Lab The UPS guy brought a box of very cool stuff to the house yesterday. It is all the stuff Christian will use in his first Electrical Engineering lab class. The capstone project in the class is the building of a voltage regulator. I have VERY fond memories of my Electrical Fundamentals class at Oregon Institute of Technology back in the 80’s. I have to admit I was pretty envious when I saw the box. It had capacitors, resistors, a breadboard, wires, and a ton of other stuff only an EE geek could appreciate.

Most of the guys in a class also bought a soldering iron and some flux core solder, but we had one left over from the radio kit we tried (and failed) to assemble and get to work. We could probably still get it going, but it would be a royal pain. Still, Christian got a ton of practice soldering and playing with components. That should help him a ton in his class.

The class he is in is an analog class. I hope he gets to do a digital circuit design class before he is done. That was wildly fun. I think, though, that era has passed. Now they learn how to program FPGA’s. That would be fun, too. Maybe they have a class at the community college that I could take in the evenings. As if I have enough time while I am trying to pay for college.

Blogging for my day job

By Dad

On Thursday, September 13, 2012

In Education, Work

Day 389 of 1000

There are lots of semi-interesting going on right now. Kelly has been given credit for a couple of additional classes that will allow her to get a summer internship position if she can find one. Hopefully it will be in a place where she can stay with someone on the west coast. If you know a company that needs a high GPA, Spanish speaking, statistics student for a summer internship, let me know. She will be between her junior and senior year. Her classes include three semesters of calculus, statistics, mathematical statistics, operations management, linear algebra, Java programming, etc. She has great people skills.

Christian has started his job as an undergraduate researcher in Optical Sensing Lab at NCSU. The professor who runs the lab said he would put Christian’s bioup there soon.

My buddy, Brett at my day job and I have decided we need to up our presence on the internet so we are both going to write blog posts for the company blog. I hope to do it at a rate of a couple per week if I can think of good material. I will put a link to the first post here as soon as I write it. Maybe I will be able to get to it this weekend.

Christian’s Hovercraft YouTube Video

By Dad

On Monday, September 3, 2012

In Education, Family, Homeschool, Technology

Christian’s YouTube video on how to make a hovercraft is now up to 65,638 hits. We are amazed it has been going. He put it up on YouTube when he was 12, so he has been getting over 15,000 hits per year. If it slows down to 10,000 hits per year, he should hit 100,000 by the time he is about 21. It is a fun video with lots of comments. We would really like to do another one, but we need to have just the right project. We are thinking about it.

Christian’s undergraduate research

By Dad

On Friday, August 31, 2012

In Education, Software, Technology, Work

Day 376 of 1000

Christian asked his Electrical Engineering professor what he could do to get some undergraduate research in the EE department. His professor told him to get in touch with the EE head of graduate programs who got the word out that there was an undergraduate math student who would like to do some research. From there, he got two interviews, both of whom gave him an offer of work. He would like to take both, but I doubt there will be time for that.

The latest offer would give him three hours of independent study research credit gathering data with a spectrophotometer. It might even lead to paid work. It is under a young professor who got his PhD from one of the top two optics school in the country. That would be an awesome opportunity because it is real research aimed at discovery and he would be gathering primary data. The first job was also quite good because it would give him an opportunity to hone his expand on his Python programming skills. I am not sure that would turn into anything other than a software maintenance job, but programming experience never hurts.

Schools out for (a very short) summer

By Dad

On Friday, August 3, 2012

In Education, Family

Day 348 of 1000

I drove to Wilmington for a series of meetings at GE while the family slept in for a well deserved rest. When I got home, Kelly was just going out the door to one of two weekend baby-sitting gigs. This weekend is going to be a low stress weekend because there is really not much to do other than cut up the big branch of the persimmon tree that broke in our yard and work on hobby stuff. Kelly is going to draw. Christian is writing a python program to send web pages as images to his messaging phone (not a smart phone-all it can do is send and receive SMS messages and photos). I think he is doing this in rebellion because we have not yet bought him a Droid.

When I got home from my day trip, I laid out the kids schedule in my new Outlook.com calendar. Very cool. I like it a lot. If they added an office suite like Google Docs, I would make a complete switch. Oops. I spoke too soon they have it. There is no longer any reason to stay on Google. With a 7GB of free storage space it is a pretty amazing deal. At any rate, the kids seem to have pretty good schedules for the fall semester. The next challenge will be to buy books. I need to add Lorena’s classes to the calendar. Then we will know how chaotic our lives will be for the next four months. The really cool thing is that their classes end on November 30 with a half dead-week and finals in the first week of Decemeber so they will have quite a long Christmas break. They don’t go back to classes until January 9.

The first semester at NCSU is complete

By Dad

On Thursday, August 2, 2012

Day 347 of 1000

Wow. We were very, very happy with the grades Kelly and Christian received in their summer classes. Christian took Chemistry from a hard professor and learned a lot about both Chemistry and how to take a hard class at a national research university from a hard professor. Kelly had a very interesting class from a 75 year old emeritus math professor called Foundations of Advanced Math.

At the beginning of the class he said it was possible to pass the class just by memorizing the proofs, but if you did it that way you would lose out on two levels. First, it would be hard to get a good grade doing it that way. Second, if the student did not have a “lights going on” experience during the semester, their math world would only involve ciphering and not “real” math. The amazing thing is that Kelly absolutely had that lights on moment.

It was late in the semester and she was really struggling. She had gotten great scores on the homework and some extra credit opportunities, but the first mid-term was very hard with only middling results. A little bit before the last mid-term, we could actually see the whole lights on thing happening. She did better on the second mid-term, but absolutely smoked the final. How good does it feel when you really get something with which you struggled. The getting it is better than the grade.

Christian has the most loyal cat I have ever seen

By Dad

On Tuesday, July 24, 2012

In Education, Family, Pets

Rubix, Christian's loyal cat

Christian’s cat, Rubix hates everyone in the family except Christian. Lorena especially annoys here by trying to give her tight hugs all the time. She is amazingly dedicated to Christian–almost like a dog. She comes and sits on his lap, computer, book, or anything Christian is using so she can just be with him. She has been the dominant cat in the Rubix-Kiwi nexus, but that has been changing lately. Somehow, when we switched from dry cat food to canned cat food Rubix got dramatically more passive and Kiwi got dramatically more interested in getting fed.

At first we thought it was because she was not getting enough to eat, but she is definitely not losing any weight, so now we think it is because she really, REALLY likes the canned cat food. We made the switch because the vet said we should. We hope it is helping Rubix lose weight, but for her, it is too early to tell. We read up on the behavior and found that dominance can change in these kinds of cases, The funny deal is that even though Rubix is less dominant, Kiwi does not seem to have gotten more dominant–just annoying when she comes to meow for cat food at 5:30 every morning. It has gotten bad enough that Lorena has put a spray bottle filled with water beside our bed. Cats and Mexican wives make for lots of drama in the household.

Doing a hard degree is hard

By Dad

On Sunday, July 22, 2012

In Education, Work

Day 336 of 1000

My brother-in-law, Lauro has a very important job in Mexico. Part of the reason he got the job is that he went to a very prestigious school and studied a hard engineering degree. The only way he could afford to go to that school was by studying very hard in high school to get a scholarship. The scholarship required him to do work at the university while he studied which made his degree even harder. His first job in Tijuana with a large Japanese manufacturing company was not so prestigious, but he did well there because he had already learned how to do hard stuff during his university years.

I have been talking to Kelly and Christian about this. Right now they are starting the hardest part of difficult degrees with lots of high level math. If they want to get through, they will have to work very, very hard and they will have to work long days. They have done a little of that already, but nothing like what is coming. If they do, they will not only get great degrees and open some new doors for themselves, but they will learn that the hard work is a joy onto itself. The latter is WAY more important than the former and I want that for my kids. It is great that they have the example of their uncle Lauro.

The funny deal is that it is never too late to start working hard on something that pushes you out of your comfort zone. I went back for a Masters Degree when I was thirty-two and it was one of the great joys of my life. At the time, I had regular misgivings about whether I was crazy or something. My buddy Andrew is starting back for an awesome Masters Degree at NCSU. He has always had an incredible work ethic, but I am sure leaving his day job to go back to school was not a comfortable decision. Still, it is a joy to watch. The thing that is cool is that my kids get to see examples like that. My hope for them is that they take those examples to heart.

Indoctrination at NCSU

By Dad

On Thursday, July 19, 2012

In Christianity, culture, Education, Socialization

The kids have orientation at NCSU today. So far they have heard about all the special benefits people receive solely because of the color of their skin or their sexual behavior choices. It is a good thing they are Mexican or they would not receive all the special privileges and advantages that are withheld from white males. It all seems pretty degrading to me. Thankfully, the only have one or two more brainwashing classes each–they got most of that stuff out of the way at Wake Technical Community College. Still, it is a shame they have to run the gaunlet of such nonsense to get to classes that actually teach them stuff that is relative true like math and chemistry.

Follow-up from the Saylor Foundaton

By Dad

On Monday, July 9, 2012

I just received the following clarification from a representative of the Saylor Foundation in response to our previous post about her organization. We thank Cami Roden for taking the time to explain Saylor’s methods for documenting and certifying the completion of a course.

Hi there,

Thank you so much for including the Saylor Foundation in your blog post! I’m the Community and External Affairs for the Saylor Foundation, and just wanted to quickly clarify your point about ways our students can demonstrate that they took the course. If you click through any of our completed courses, you’ll see that each course starts with a set of learning objectives, which are further broken down across each of the course units. At the end of each course, there is a final exam that tests the student’s knowledge and comprehension of each of the course objectives. Upon passing the final exam, students can download and print a certificate of completion – and those students who are using our ePortfolio system also can show proof of completion via their transcript. I hope this clears up any points of confusion! If you have any questions about Saylor.org, please don’t hesitate to reach out.

My best,

Camie

Rodney Starks’ The Triumph of Christianity

By Dad

On Monday, July 9, 2012

In Christianity, culture, Education

Day 323 of 1000

The last issue of World Magazine had an article on the most recent Rodney Stark book, the Triumph of Christianity. I have read other books he has authored: The Rise of Christianity, The Victory of Reason, and God’s Battalions. He is an amazing author whose non-fiction books on the sociology of Christianity read like novels. I have not yet read this one. Stark was a professor at University of Washington for 32 years before he moved on to a position as University Professor and co-director of the Institute for Studies of Religion at Baylor University.

I had bought into a many of the popular myths about Christian culture that permeate our society before I read his books. Some of the ideas held by society at large with respect to the Crusades, the Dark Ages, and the spread of Chrisitanity are just wrong. Rodney Stark has done more to debunk these myths than anyone. Whenever I hear such myths confidently propounded, I want to just start handing out Stark’s books. I can hardly wait to read his latest effort.

Great summer classes

By Dad

On Friday, July 6, 2012

Day 320 of 1000

I am really glad Christian and Kelly both chose to take a class this summer. Both of them needed it to be able to graduate in two years. Actually they need to do the same thing again next summer, but I think they are getting more benefit out of these first classes than just the learning and the credit. Kelly’s Foundations of Advanced Math class is taught by an emeritus professor who is well over 70 years old. He tells the students EXACTLY what to expect in the class including how many hours they should study for each hour they are in lecture, how it is important that they bother their professors to make sure they are “getting” the material, exactly what they need to do to get an A, etc. He gives them extra-credit points on what appears to be a regular basis. What a great first professor.

Christian is taking a required Chemistry course. It requires more time at school because it includes lab and recitation classes. Yesterday, he got an email about a help session to help go over material that will be on his first test on Monday. It is even more hours at school, but he is there now. His professor got great reviews on RateMyProfessor.com and it appears the reviews were justified. We do not know how this will end, but it has started well and there is definitely a lot of support infrastructure to help the students through the material. If they take advantage of all the help and maintain focus, there is no reason they should not do well.

An online education – Udacity and the Saylor Foundation

By Dad

On Thursday, July 5, 2012

Day 319 of 1000

Update: See clarification from Saylor Foundation here on how they provide certification of course completion.

I just read an article about a company named Udacity that provides free, college level education on line. It does not have a lot of content yet, but, if I get the concept, it sounds better than some other on line educational systems. The idea is this:

Anyone can take any class they want any time they want for free.
After the course is completed, the student can go to a walk-in Udacity testing center to take a test to show they actual get the material and it was not someone else who took the course for them.

If you are into education solely for the sake of learning stuff, then their are probably better sites around. Andrew pointed us to the Saylor Foundation website. It has full blown college classes by great universities, but no way for a student to unequivocally demonstrate they took the course and understand the material. If the Saylor Foundation added some say to do that, they would be way ahead of Udacity and have a way to make more money. They same is true for Khan Academy. Stanford and MIT also have classes on line. It seems like they would benefit greatly by following this model, too.

I think this is the future. The whole issue with on line education is that it is difficult to prove you were the one who actually took the class.I think these are tremendous ideas to which there will be additonal innovation both in terms of content delivery and confirmation that the student has actually learned the material and been certified in a manner that is appreciated by industry and even academia.

Kelly trains for future cartooning

By Dad

On Wednesday, July 4, 2012

In Art, Education

Kelly has been working on her portrait skills by sketching her friends. Really, she wants to cartoon, but she has such a heavy school load that she cannot work it in other than about one drawing per night and a few on the weekend. She figures if she keeps up her drawing skills for the next couple of years she will be ready to dive in again on her cartooning during graduate school. Kelly started drawing a set of comic strip characters based around a little girl named Betty Blonde since she was nine. Then she drew and published a daily comic strip for two full years starting when she was fourteen. You can check it out here: Betty Blonde

Official!

By Dad

On Saturday, June 30, 2012

Day 314 of 1000

Kelly and Christian NCSU ID I remember when I got my first ID card at Oregon State. It was bright orange and I was quite proud. I think I still have it around here somewhere. I need to put an image of it up here for posterity. It made me feel official. Well, now that Kelly and Christian have been to school for two days AND they have their ID cards, I guess they are official now, too.

We have not figured the transportation thing out. We have too many drivers and not enough cars. Our current game plan includes taking the bus home part of the time. We have not tried that out yet, but Christian has been poring over the bus routes and has it pretty well figured out. We will see how that goes. Eventually we are going to have to break down and buy another car. Maybe that was a poor choice of words.

Understanding the Times–Thank you David Noebel

By Dad

On Friday, June 29, 2012

In Christianity, culture, Education, Family, Homeschool, Politics, Socialization

Day 313 of 1000

Lately, our family talks about world views, morality, and world events more than has been normal for us in the past. I think this is because of the election in Mexico on Sunday, the election in the US in November, some Supreme Court rulings, propaganda filled college orientations indoctrinations, events in the Middle East, and our own rapidly changing lives. In the midst of all that, Christian is selling a lot of our old homeschool books to raise money to buy books, cell phones, and other stuff he and Kelly need for college. One of those books is titled, Understanding the Times by David A. Noebel. Kelly, Christian, and I read the book aloud together. We liked it very much because it pulled together a lot of material we had studied previously into a discussion about world views.

Actually, I have already written about the book a number of times. You can find those posts by clicking on the following links:

We read a lot of books, listened to audio talks, and watched videos about different worldview issues. Paul Johnson, Lila Rose, William Lane Craig, Greg Koukl, Dale Carnegie, William Dembski, Stephen Meyer, Robert Spenser, and others helped us to understand the historical reality of the death and resurrection of Jesus, the seminal role of Christianity in science, law, commerce, education, and the emancipation of slaves and women. They showed us why abortion and homesexual behavior are wrong and traditional marriage is right. The main thing Understanding the Times gave us was a grasp of how different worldviews understand all of these important topics and what to expect from people who are true to these competing worldviews.

The reason this has all come to mind is that we really tried to give the kids a sense for why they should hold to a biblical worldview. This book helped tie a lot of disparate topics together into a cogent whole. The deeper we delved into these subjects, the better we understood the truths on which a biblical worldview are founded. Understanding the Times did a good job of giving us the big picture when the kids were just starting high school. It has gone a long way to prepare them for what they have confronted in college. For that I am grateful.

NCSU First day at University

By Dad

On Thursday, June 28, 2012

In culture, Education, Family, Homeschool

Day 312 of 1000

Kelly's and Christian's first day at NCSU We are running out of “first day of school” picture opportunities. If all goes well, the kids will be off to graduate school in a couple of years, but we doubt whether we will be there to take the picture. We often talk about the concept of life-long learning, so maybe I am wrong. I hope so. Our departed friend, John Sterling often told us about a fellow, I think it was Beach Paddon who just kept going to college. My understanding is that he got a new Masters degree every now and then.

This is a favorite topic of Charles Murray the co-author of, Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life. Christian and I have spoken about how cool it would be to continue getting Masters degrees as a hobby after he finishes his “real” school. That is one way to continue learning, but self-teaching and pursuit of knowledge not readily available in college through alternate means are other good ways to keep learning. Homeschooling certainly served me well in that regard. Kelly has a sense for what she wants to do when she gets out of college and she will have to continually study and work to make it happen. Her school will give her something to do that she enjoys and will pay the rent, but her vocation lies in a completely separate direction.

At any rate, we have hit another milestone. The kids are stressed and excited. Lorena and I are a little bit melancholy.

Thursday in Roanoke while Lorena fights Microeconomics battles

By Dad

On Thursday, January 26, 2012

In Education, Technology, Work

Day 157 of 1000

I am scheduled to put over 1000 miles on the pick-up this week. This morning, I am writing from a McDonalds about a half an hour out of Roanoke, Virginia. My understanding is that I will maintain this fairly crazy travel schedule through the end of March. I have a trip to British Columbia the first week of April, then, hopefully, I will only need to make a couple of road trips per month. I get a little bit fried from sitting in the pickup for so long with only restaurant food and very little exercise, but going out to meet customers, look at their machine vision applications, and try to find solutions is absolutely invigorating. I am working on a bleeding edge technology to solve a new class of problems that have been waiting for a solution for a long time.

The solution involves the use of a regular machine vision camera (imagine an industrial, high quality webcam) which captures 2D images to create 3D images with the help of a line laser. The technology has been around for a long time, but now a company has packaged it in a way that makes its use in generic applications very, very much easier than was ever possible before. My company has given me license to develop a product around the new technology and I am enjoying it immensely.

In some much more interesting news, Lorena’s Microeconomics professor asked the whole class to prepare to draw some graphs that describe Microeconomics concepts on the whiteboard in front of the class. He did a really bad job of describing the concepts so no one in the class was prepared to draw the graphs except Lorena. Lorena was prepared because, when she could not figure out what to do, Christian showed her the Khan Academy Microeconomics videos. She was the most prepared of the class, so the professor picked her first, then (according to Lorena) he with ridicule through two of the examples. I was getting pretty exercised about the whole deal until she told me he was not really mean, just demanding and he did it to the whole class.

I am really sad that Lorena cannot draw like Kelly because it would be great to have a drawing of him for this blog post. Lorena, if you read this, next time you are in class, take a surreptitious photo of your professors with your cell phone so Kelly can draw them for her (and my) blog posts. Lorena describes the guy as a fat, bald guy with long hair who looks like he might be very comfortable on a Harley Davidson. I like the guy already and wonder if he has any tattoos.

That Khan Academy thing reminded me I want to ask Kelly how many Linear Algebra videos she watched today.

They are studying hard now!!!

By Dad

On Tuesday, December 13, 2011

In Art, Education

Here are Kelly’s multivariable calculus notes that she texted to me from her review class.

Kelly's multivariable calculus review notes for the final

Finals week and Economic Animation

By Dad

On Monday, December 12, 2011

In Business, Education, Money, Technology, Work

Day 112 of 1000

This week is finals week at Wake Technical Community College. Everyone in the house except me studied for finals. I worked on a project for my new job which involved mostly study about a new product. I am going to be glad for three weeks of non-study activities starting next week. The one fun thing that happened this weekend was Christian’s Macroeconomics project. He had to put together a brief video of some macroeconomic principle. The first pass was not so good, so he decided he would try to learn how to do animation and use that to smooth over the rough spots. This is what he produced:

Update: He did it in Linux with Kdenlive, Inkscape, pencil, paper, scanner, and his Nikon d90.

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