Free "Techniques" Course

geo_leeman

I'm teaching a graduate course called "Techniques of Geophysical Experimentation" this semester that is an overview of many semesters of engineering content for scientists. We have covered basic machining operations, very basic electronics/micros, and will venture more into transducers and control systems by the end of the semester. I'm experimenting with putting all of the content online - assignments, notes, slides, lecture videos, etc. It's all at tge.geoscience.tech with some parts more complete than others. I'm filling things in as we go and getting as much up as I can between doing my own research. I thought maybe someone would find it useful or even end up contributing. It's all restructured text files piled in a GitHub repo with Sphinx builds. So far this seems like a really great way to have the content open and easily upgraded by students and the community. Maybe Parallax would even be interested in making their tutorials in a similar format so that they could be edited via PR's by the community when things need updating. Sure could ease some of the burden.

macrobeak

geo,
I had a look at your course website.
I think the course framework is good and I am glad to see you bridging the gap between science and engineering content.
Good luck with your venture.

geo_leeman

Thanks @macrobeak ! We're having pretty good luck with the course so far and have had a few pull requests. Hopefully it will keep getting more and more filled out as the content is used. First time through is always a bit of an adventure.

stamptrol

Very nice presentations.

I do bits and pieces of the same kind of thing with our local university and their Technology, Management and Entrepreneurship program. As well, the local Makerspace is interested in the same kind of thing which I hope to present this winter.

Happy to share anything which may interest you.

My ongoing lament is that we're presenting at the graduate level rather than middle school!

Cheers,

Tom Sisk

Tracy Allen

Ambitious project! I was pleased and amused to see the detailed coverage of hand tools. Despite admonitions, I've been known to use a screwdriver to pry open a can of paint as well as for other more noble repurposings.

I followed your link to GeoSci.xyz and that helped to see how this fits into the big picture at UBC. The section on electromagnetic geophysics caught my eye. In your resources/books section I saw the one, "Building Scientific Apparatus", which I wasn't aware of and looks quite good.

Arduino? Will you introduce your students to Propellerland?

geo_leeman

@stamptrol - I agree we need to get things into the hands of kids much earlier than we do now. While this course is targeted at a grad level class, I'm hoping that some of the material would be useful to others. Ideally there would be basic and advanced information and you could dive in at whatever level felt good. That's a lot of work away though and needs contributors.

@Tracy - I didn't think I needed that much detail, but even grad students had problems using a chuck on a drill press or knowing proper hand tool technique... it was shocking really. I got the structure for this from friends at UBC and started filling in the content. I'm in the final months of completing my own PhD, so deciding to develop a course from scratch has resulted in long days recently! Either way, I want to help give some content back to the internet at large.

The book "Building Scientific Apparatus" is really pretty nice. It doesn't hit things with a lot of depth, but has good overviews and nice schematic looking figures instead of very sterile illustrations done in Illustrator. I'm going to be adding more to the content, but feel free to start an issue with other recommended resources. That's the beauty of this setup - it's all on Git and auto link checked/built with Travis and Read the Docs. Makes maintenance, upkeep, and collaboration much easier.

I think I'll be mentioning the prop, but we just don't have enough time to get into it really. We used the inventors kit as a base since it had a lot of useful parts and the start of the semester snuck up Many of them have certainly seen my propeller projects around the lab over the last few years though.