Poster Printing

This took a little longer than I expected, about four hours total of printing mishaps, waiting for our turn, and making last minute revisions. Not fun but at least it's now done. Only two days left before final presentation. Pretty excited to get back home, it was ridiculously hot today and I definitely don't want to be here during August. For the poster there are a lot of templates on Power Point, most of them won't help you but at least its a start. The dimensions are supposed to be 36 width by 24 heights. It'll help a lot if you know this before starting your poster. Learned about zero member forces as well in my statics class. Last day of that so that's nice to know. If I keep on this track I guess that won't be the last of that class that I see but then again who knows what's up ahead. Maybe I'll just go tour the world for the rest of my life, ever think about doing that? Sometimes you have to give these things serious thought.

Worked on Presentation

My projects presentation was to big due to the number of videos I inserted. I found it very handy to present things from RISA using a program that recorded whatever was on my screen. Macs have a built in ability to do this but for Windows you need to download a free program from online. There are several options but I used CamStudio. This worked very well, a couple glitches but at least I haven't received a virus. I brought RISA up on my labtop, got the portable version from my grad student teacher incredibly handy, and simply recorded my screen on RISA as I demonstrated the various functions of the program. This did create large videos though and in the end we had a powerpoint of almost five gigs. Powerpoint when it gets to this size has a very difficult time running and since you have to be able to fit your powerpoint on a flash drive, it wasn't really practical. So I thinned down the videos and it works pretty well. Hope this was useful to someone. 

No Tour

No tour today, class was canceled. I attended the Statics course again. While this course has been helpful it hasn't at all furthered my desire to be an engineer. That was supposed to be left to this REU but sometimes this REU has flaked out. I am, to say the least very bummed out the tour didn't happen. All I have left at this point is the final presentation day and I'm curious as to what results I am supposed to supply. I have learned a fair amount but no actual research was conducted.

Austin

Austin was excellent. This was the second time I've been there during this REU. I highly suggest going to Amys Icecream if you ever find one in your travels since it is most delicious. It was nice to have this break before the rest of this week which I assume will be pretty busy with creating a stellar power point presentation. Also there is supposed to be a Truss Factory tour which I think will be very exciting. I am very much looking forward to this because I would never get a chance like to this at my college.

Finished my Poster

I'm well ahead of schedual having finished my reflection paper last week, and now done with my poster. Aside from my partners corrections the process is done. All I have left is the power point presentation which I don't foresee being a problem at all. I will certainly have the time next week to complete it. So since not much is going on I think I'll take a trip to Austin for the weekend and see a bit more of Texas.

Wood Structures

Today was actually incredibly interesting. I appreciate Dr. Yazdanis ability to connect the listeners beyond the PowerPoint lecture.  Questioning students about what is actually going on within the concepts. The PowerPoint lecture, in my experience, will kill an educational experience in the class room. It quite simply makes the job too easy for the teacher, who often rush the process because the next concept is only a click away. No longer does the teacher have to take the time to erase the chalkboard and I think we forget that this was the prime time for questions from the students. With the PowerPoint students simply don't have the time to voice a question. Even if the teacher does give time or offers up the old favorite, "Just stop me if you have any questions or if I'm going too fast."...yeah like that opens up the students mind to questioning. So I appreciate Dr. Yazdanies ability to engage us a little more than other Professors might have done with this lecture.

Integration is pretty dry

There wasn't much to do today except for the statics class again. We moved into some pretty complicated stuff today though such as Moment of Inertia. Its a concept that it helps having some calc 2 experience and I found the integration method was easier to understand then a similar triangles method that we also went over. All in all I was pretty confused during the class since usually I need to read up on lectures before if I want it to stick in my head. For example the questions involved where as follows, use integration to find moments of inertia with respect to x and y. Not exactly the most entertaining and especially since I did really know what was going on it would have been nice be taught a little of these concepts in our actual lecture. It seems right now as thought the other groups are coming up with actual research findings whereas my group seems to be struggling to come up with something to learn every week.