Week 4: magnetism & mindmap

 

Today, we started class by writing all our thoughts on paper. I had a lot going on the past few weeks but never had the time to look over each moment or clean out what I’ve just been thinking about in my head. But these 10-15 minutes of word vomiting allowed me to force myself into focusing on what my mind was thinking and how my thoughts were processing. Looking at the paper after, I had all kinds of thoughts going on, but I felt relieved afterward. It began with me planning out a schedule for what I should be doing after class; I did a little bit of ranting about my cs project; and it ended with me talking about my favorite song at the moment. There was no consistent trail of thoughts, but it was everything that I was thinking about. 

After this moment, we transitioned into learning about magnetism. It was a topic I had covered when I was in high school physics, but it felt like such a long time ago. We got to see and learn more about the magnetic field of the Earth as well as the magnetic field of the aurora. I would say relearning concepts of Maxwell’s Equation was overwhelming, but I really enjoyed the interactive part of the class. Dr. Gekelman brought in a lot of items that showed us visually how magnets and the magnetic field work in relation to mass. I found a specific project that worked with iron fillings

and ferrofluid is especially interesting. 

 

 

 

 

 

 


During Thursday’s class, the class collectively worked on creating a mind map of all the concepts we had learned in class.  It began with us laying out the bigger/broader concepts, and we could see it gradually becoming a narrower mind map with more information. After taking the time to remind ourselves about each concept we learned in class, I saw myself being particularly interested in researching more about the connection between humans and art technology. I want to find that connection between humans interacting with the art produced through technology. Specifically, I really enjoyed the Tethers project that allows for each person to have a unique outcome as heartbeat is unique to each individual.