Thursday, September 27, 2012

Together We are Smarter

At SimInsights, we believe in the power of collaborative learning. As an undergraduate at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), I have experienced the effectiveness of learning through collaboration with others, as well as interaction with the material, firsthand. You see, the Institute operates on an Honor Code, and though each student must complete and hand in his or her own work, we are given virtually infinite freedom to collaborate with other students on most assignments. By feeding off our friends' academic strengths and supporting each other's weaknesses, we create a synergy whereby we gain a much deeper understanding of even the most complex topics than we could ever hope to on our own. We as students quickly realize that, especially in the STEM fields, not only are two heads better than one, but three heads are better than two and so forth. This freedom of collaboration led me to choose Caltech as the starting point of my higher education in the first place. This same spirit of collaboration, that same notion that ideas grow faster and with more potency the more freely they flow between individuals, drove me to pursue an internship at SimInsights. But our organization brings another key mechanism to the table, a tool which will allow the full efficacy of collaborative learning to come to fruition: that of interactive simulation. At Caltech we frequently take advantage of whiteboards strewn across every residence hall in order to represent visually the abstract concepts we strive to grasp, but this often comes up short. Even the most effective whiteboard illustration generated by a student will eventually have to get erased, eliminating the possibility of anyone sampling or otherwise gaining inspiration from that fleeting educational tool en route to producing even more powerful illustrations. And, of course, figures on a whiteboard cannot move. Games and simulations created by SimInsights and those in the SimInsights community take us beyond these frustrating limitations, and we're just getting started. With SimInsights' platform for developing interactive, dynamic, and above all fun and engaging  educational games and simulations, the future of collaborative learning, and indeed knowledge dissemination on the whole, is approaching faster than most can imagine.

These are exciting times.

So come, learn more about what we do here at SimInsights. Let us grow together in knowledge.

- Brian

No comments:

Post a Comment