The STEMpunk Project with Trent Fowler

Trent Fowler spent the past year teaching himself as much about computer science, electronics, mechanics, and artificial intelligence as possible. In the service of this quest, he has torn apart broken fans and pumps to inspect their internal components, read circuit diagrams, watched videos on induction motors, subpanels, transmissions, and batteries, worked with SparkFun electronics kits to make LED bulbs flash when buttons are pushed, devoured textbooks on AI, computer science fundamentals, and mechanical engineering, picked up a soldering iron, and written code.

Trent is going to share with us two kinds of insights gain from this endeavor. First, how many of the "black boxes" that surround us -- all the stuff from toilets to diesel engines to cell phones that we hardly think about, until perhaps it breaks -- are less black boxes now that he has opened them up and learned about how they all work. And second, and perhaps in the long run more significant than any of these specific insights, what he has learned about the learning process itself -- how to handle the frustration of not making apparent progress, how to handle distraction, how to maintain energy and morale, how to prioritize, how to have meta-knowledge about your state of knowledge (agnosis, semignosis, etc), and how to maintain a growth mindset rather than fixed mindset (being an incremental theorist), and handle feelings of shame or embarrassment associated with the inevitable failure that comes constantly with the growth mindset.

This meeting will be at the George Reynolds branch of the Boulder Public Library -- note the change of location.