Curious driven learning
Greeting fellows, my name is Kantitut Tubsuwan, but just call me Oak or Oka as my British Ph.D. Prof did. I have background on a Structure engineering and Building Physics, and Architecture is my enthusiastic subject (but I’m really bad in drawing). Therefore, I ended up by teaching architect students at Kasetsart University.
Main subjects that I teach are the structure mechanic, Building Physic, Mathematic for structure, and some part of Building performance simulation. Yeah! I’m teaching right hemisphere dominated students about mainly calculation subjects. This is my pain point.
Luckily, I was invited by my colleague to join the ITS program by Stanford University. In this community, I gained lots of idea and teaching strategies form friends and coaches. One idea that very compatible for me is “The curiosity is the key for learning”. This sentence pulled me back to the day I decided to continue my Master degree and Ph.D., which was the curiosity to solve problems and to explore. But how could I motivate student in class?
During ITS coaching session, the concept of exploration before explanation was described and I applied it with my class. My activity was to brought students out of the room and their structure was not a building element, but the tree. I assigned them to calculate forces at branches and reaction at the base of the tree. They were struggle since they really did not know how to find right solution, and most of them tried google :) After activity, I start to explain the solution and concept and found that they were eager to learn more, which I think I was success.
In the end of my story, the curiosity is not only apply when you’re studying, but your entire life ;)
