Self-directed & continuous learning
At the begging of the semester in the first quartile I had the assignments of Introducing Electronics and Creating New Materials for Design. Since the educational system at TU/e is different from my University and students are more responsible of their development and time, I struggled at the end of the first quartile because I didn’t organize efficiently my time through the quartile and I found myself finishing my deliverables the last week. Reflecting on my experience I realized that the first thing to do is to learn how to keep track of our development frequently and also find the way of storing all the evidence in a “format” that permit us in at the end to access that data base and
don’t lose time gathering all the bits and pieces. For the Project I had the same situation, I had a lot of material and before the midterm exhibition I had difficulties choosing the most relevant Concepts and aspects. I regret that if I had chosen since the begging one direction I would have generated less Concepts but more detailed.
during the previous week and I was not aware of my work rhythm, because of that in the end of the quartile I struggled getting everything together.
After the midterm exhibition I decide to plan my weeks to come and create a system to update frequently my development. The problem with the previous planning was that I did not organize my activities in long terms but only for the week. What happened was that frequently I lose track of what I did
New Materials for Design
Learning activities Assignments: Introducing Electronics
Prototyping 3D and Model Making Identity
Extra Activities: Arduino Music Hack Day Flash
Calendar
The system I decided to use was an interactive calendar where I could see in the long term the deadlines for the deliverables and reports, but also to have the possibility of adding daily tasks or rescheduling short-term activities to do some others. This calendar was not other than a large A0 attach to my wall with the days of the month with my assignment schedule and the deadlines for the deliverables, but I left some space for each day in order to add activities. I used colored post for each day so I could recognize the activities that I should have done in other days. Up to this day, the end of the second quartile, I feel that my planning and organization of the activities help me to finalize the assignments and the project with out regretting the lack of time dedicated to
each activity. Also with this calendar I was able to assign days of my week to gather the work and reflect on the progress or the errors. The evidence I stored it as always in digital version to but what I did different this semester was that I printed the evidence in a A4 and then stick it to my wall, as small child paste their drawings over the refrigerator. Having my entire wall covered with my sketches, ideas, reflections‌ was like a hall of fame and I found very handy to see all my work gathered in one place and easy to access.