Yesterday, after weeks of love and labor, I finally got the opportunity to share my project MagicMountain with an audience. This came in the form of a gallery walk which served as a culminating event of the Teaching and Learning Lab practicum my work so far has been involved with. Like the work on MagicMountain itself, gearing up for this presentation was an iterative process. Thankfully, a few weeks before this gallery walk I had the opportunity to do a mock presentation of the project at a smaller inter-office showcase. Such an opportunity to do a practice run of my material proved quite invaluable, as I was able to not only do a live demonstration of the code but also receive feedback from Bok center staff. The feedback here was particularly helpful, as most of the staff present had been working on projects similarly involving extensive use of Gen AI API calls.
Taking this feedback to heart, I made a few tweaks to my project in the weeks preceding the gallery walk. Though much of the programming stayed the same, sans some prompt engineering for the image creation, most of my work came in the form of slimming down my presentation. The event at the Bok Center was a much longer form affair, with a spotlight on this project for the majority of the time. On the other hand, the gallery walk was an open house affair, with potential purveyors of my project only stopping by for a fraction of the time they did in my previous presentation. As such, my presentation this time was less focused on the technical wherewithal and more on the project's ethos. I was here able to reflect back on my teaching experience that informed this project, something that admittedly I have missed amidst the whirlwind experience HGSE has thus offered me.
Nonetheless, once the day of the gallery walk came and went, I found myself extremely affirmed with this present work. From the interactions I think the project resonated not only with my peers but also with the fellows and faculty who stopped by. Overwhelmingly the question I was asked was what I wanted to do next with the project, a thought that I had only tangentially been concerned with. I do not come from a design or business background so I had never thought about any extension of this project beyond personal use. This said, I have talked with some other students who are interested in potentially helping with this project and fleshing it out into something broader than its incarnation this class. Perhaps I could pitch the project at the Innovation Lab next semester even. Just thoughts in their infancy, however exciting ones, nonetheless.
Reflecting on the past few months of work, this project has been an incredibly rewarding experience. It provided me an opportunity to delve into AI and explore the use of APIs in a domain I had not encountered before and connecting this new knowledge to a project in my pedagogical field was especially fulfilling. Overall, this experience has left me deeply grateful, and I look forward to finding new opportunities to collaborate with the Teaching & Learning Lab or the Bok Center to continue learning about educational design and producing content in this same vein.
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