Tuesday night Tech Club had a very special treat. Engineer, violinist, and entrepreneur Andrew Forde from Toronto visited and spoke about his love of engineering, music and creativity.
Andrew is in his last semester at the University of Toronto, finishing his degree in Nanoengineering. Nanoengineering studies materials at the nano level to find properties one would desire in a material, but from the perspective of some of the smallest pieces that make up that material.
Expanding off of his engineering background Andrew has launched a new company, Sommerfeld Solutions, that implements innovative ideas for other companies. He explained, while nanoengineering is an interest of his, that the research environment doesn't fit with his need to be creative, which is one of his reasons for starting his company.
Since he was four years old he has played the violin, and actually went to an arts high school, not the typical place you would expect a typical engineer to come from. He has released one album, and will be working on a second album in Summer 2011. We were fortunate that Andrew was able to bring his violin and play three songs for us after his talk.
You can check out his music at his YouTube channel here: http://www.youtube.com/violintheory.
Pictures to come this weekend from the event! Special thanks to Cabrini Connections for hosting the event, and to Andrew Forde for sharing his story with Tech Club.
Showing posts with label engineering. Show all posts
Showing posts with label engineering. Show all posts
Wednesday, February 23, 2011
Monday, February 21, 2011
Tech Club Special Guest | Music & Science
Tuesday, February 22, Tech Club will have a very special guest all the way from Toronto, Canada. University of Toronto engineering student and entrepreneur Andrew Forde will be giving a special talk at Tech Club Tuesday night to play some contemporary music and to talk about how music and science and engineering are all related. Please join us for what will be a fun and engaging event!
Wednesday, January 19, 2011
Looking to the Past and the Future
Tuesday at Tech Club we did three main things:
We read several of
the bios on http://cr4.globalspec.com/blog/128/National-Society-of-Black-Engineers-Blog, to learn about African Americans in science and engineering. One person who stuck out was George Washington Carver, but not because he invented peanut butter. Things we didn't know about him were that his parents died when he was young and had to move from home to home, and sometimes the area he moved to didn't have a high school that would allow African Americans to attend. Fortunately the people he lived with then payed for him to have a tutor. I also learned he did not initially go to college for science, but for art. It wasn't until he transferred to Iowa State University did he study this in college. He was the first African American to attend Iowa State, and eventually went on to become a faculty member, until Tulane University offered him a job on their faculty and great research opportunities.
After we spent some time reading and discussing these important figures in the history of science and engineering, we talked about some of my first year college experiences with math and programming in the University of Michigan engineering program. I shared which classes I took, or didn't take in high school that helped me, or could have helped me during that first year of college. I felt the two most important areas of study to have a solid foundation in for the first year of college were math and programming, though many high schools do not offer programming courses.
Lastly, we did some Alice programming. Sean built a mini city and added a few characters and had a dragon flying off of one of the sky scrapers.
Next week we hope to do some more programming with Alice, and talk about how Facebook newsfeed works and how people make games for Facebook. That's all for now! See you next week!
- Learn about the contributions African Americans have made to science and technology
- Discuss what classes are helpful to take in high school to prepare for science and engineering programs in college
- Work more with Alice, the programming tool, to learn more about how to add stationary objects and how to make the moving objects interact with them
We read several of
the bios on http://cr4.globalspec.com/blog/128/National-Society-of-Black-Engineers-Blog, to learn about African Americans in science and engineering. One person who stuck out was George Washington Carver, but not because he invented peanut butter. Things we didn't know about him were that his parents died when he was young and had to move from home to home, and sometimes the area he moved to didn't have a high school that would allow African Americans to attend. Fortunately the people he lived with then payed for him to have a tutor. I also learned he did not initially go to college for science, but for art. It wasn't until he transferred to Iowa State University did he study this in college. He was the first African American to attend Iowa State, and eventually went on to become a faculty member, until Tulane University offered him a job on their faculty and great research opportunities.After we spent some time reading and discussing these important figures in the history of science and engineering, we talked about some of my first year college experiences with math and programming in the University of Michigan engineering program. I shared which classes I took, or didn't take in high school that helped me, or could have helped me during that first year of college. I felt the two most important areas of study to have a solid foundation in for the first year of college were math and programming, though many high schools do not offer programming courses.
Lastly, we did some Alice programming. Sean built a mini city and added a few characters and had a dragon flying off of one of the sky scrapers.
Next week we hope to do some more programming with Alice, and talk about how Facebook newsfeed works and how people make games for Facebook. That's all for now! See you next week!
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