Personal Summary

Liu Zhe

Part 3: Creative studying motivated by the inspiring teaching methods

I have already heard about this challenging course before this semester, and I then experienced it in the past four months. This is the most challenging course I have ever taken, just as most of the students would probably say, but the special teaching method Professor Koo used is really the one I think that distinguishes it from other ordinary courses. The teaching style of this whole course could be summarized by words inspiring, impressive and motivating, and my creative studying ability has been gradually trained. Here I want to mention several points that give me the deepest impression from learning this course.

The first thing should be the blogs on Toyhouse.cc. No course before has ever used such a way to submit and present homework, but I feel in this way students can be naturally motivated to express their thoughts freely and learn from each other regularly. Toyhouse.cc has also offered a platform for students to exchange ideas and ask and answer questions. For example, when we were recommended to read the two famous papers written by Codd and Chen, respectively, most of us posted our thoughts on Toyhouse.cc, and you could find many discussions following our blogs. In this way, our understanding of these papers was strengthened. In my opinion, blogging not only helps us record our studying process and important thoughts or discoveries, but also forces us to learn to express our ideas in English. I have never taken any English writing class and found it hard to express my thoughts freely and accurately at the beginning. But by regularly practicing and reading other’s blogs, my writing skill has been significantly improved. I do not like to write blogs perfunctorily, like some of the students have been doing, so I always spend a lot of time on a blog if I decided to write it, from planning to collecting related material, to composing the article and revising it. I aimed at making each of my blog to be valuable and impressive. As a result, many of my blogs have drawn others’ attention successfully; this is shown by the following pictures taken from the Top Content, Toyhouse.cc.

The second thing is the use of advanced technology to help with our study. Professor Koo always introduces interesting techniques and skills to us and tries to associate them with our learning scope. Take Dropbox as an example, Koo recommended us to have a try using Dropbox to facilitate our life and study, and he also made us think about the underlying mechanism and technology and relate it to database concepts. Another example is his suggestion of using Mathematica in our scientific research and presentation. I have to say that my enthusiasm for Mathematica is greatly aroused by my professor, and I have had a thorough exploration of Mathematica in this semester. I learnt to use Mathematica as a powerful documentation and presentation tool in our midterm report, and I learnt its package mechanism and tried myself to write some packages to help learn Engineering Economy and Operations Research. At the end of the semester, I started to write a lengthy story called My Story with Mathematica to tell my learning experience and my love for Mathematica. I think Professor Koo’s effort in introducing up-to-date technology has helped us keep up with the scientific frontier and even think ahead of the majority, in which way we are armed with the most advanced tools so that our research and exploration could be much more efficient and influential.

The third thing comes to the Toyhouse, the real toyhouse in Shunde Building, a place where miracles are born. I really admire Professor Koo for his great effort in motivating students to learn and helping us with all his resources. He is so generous that he offers his own office to us students to do teamwork like preparing for the lecture, and he allows us to be free in Toyhouse so that we can take out food and beverage from his refrigerator to eat and drink, just feeling like being at home. Toyhouse is no doubt a great place to work on our project or prepare for the presentation, because it has a bright and comfortable environment and there are many kinds of useful equipment in it that, like the projector, screen, whiteboard, stereo system, and so on. Only in such good environment can we make efficient and productive group work, and our creativity is exercised.

The fourth thing is about video. Professor Koo is always very excited when he sees impressive video, and he often tells us the importance of this kind of media in future scientific field. I agree with him that video is a very impressive way of presenting information and passing knowledge. A good picture is worth a thousand words, and a good video is worth a thousand pictures! I believe that the videos we ADAM group made through this semester have left deep impression on everyone, because our creativity is totally demonstrated by the videos. We had attractive plots, interesting performance, and professional filming and editing. We tried to use our video as a tool that attracts the audiences’ eyeballs, so our later presentation and narration gained more attention and thus had better effects. From producing videos, not only have we learnt the specific techniques and skills, but we also got to know how to make high-quality presentations and how to advertise for our product. In a word, producing video has benefited us a lot and is really a helpful method to inspire students’ creativity in their study.