This semester has been wildly different than I ever could have imagined. In fact, this whole school year has been nothing I could have anticipated. After breaking two bones requiring surgery in the middle of fall semester, I was just starting to feel like I was getting back to normal when the coronavirus began to be a larger problem in the US and Smith transitioned to distance learning. That transition made me really consider all the topics we had covered in class.
However, despite, or perhaps because of, everything that has occurred, this course has been one of my favorite courses to take at Smith. The discussions and in class activities that took place during the first half of the semester, always made me consider new perspectives and be more open to wild ideas. I never could have come up with the idea for POMO (the robotic chair with a built in Podermo timer) by myself, but when put in a group with Eli and Emily, we were able to come up with this really cool, if impractical, idea, and I saw this replicated in other groups in class. Even the transition to online learning did not diminish the collaborative vibe of the class. The whole class discussions and the use of breakout rooms meant that the class continued to feel relevant and be engaging, much more than any of my other classes.
I have always been fairly rigid in my thinking, especially when it comes to schoolwork. If a project idea did not seem practical, I would choose something else, generally something that I could imagine the steps needed to complete it. I was not expecting any of the courses I took in the Computer Science major to challenge my rigid thinking, however that is exactly what this course did. Throughout the semester I learned that imagining and designing products that seem completely wild and impractical is not only fun, but also opens up the door to designing entirely new, fun products, that would never have been considered previously.
