In thinking back on the various training courses that I’ve taken, I have to exclude the death by PDF type courses that my company loves to give. In short, it’s not fun to learn by reading a PDF of a software test plan. I think that i’ll identify a course i took in the Navy and an engineering class i took in college.
When i was in the Navy, I wanted to qualify as an Electrolytic Oxygen Generator (EOG) technician. Normally a person that was in my occupation didn’t go to this course, but I had an interest in this and asked long enough that my command said ok. Now some courses in the Navy can be taught in less time that is allotted or simplified to let you just go home. Other courses don’t mess around and require a lot of work. When i went to this course, i expected the latter of the two, but unfortunately was met with the former. The instructors sort of covered the topics, they walked through a couple of things, but overall it was a terrible waste of time. And to top that off, I walked away with a certification that meant I could work on the machine. I picked up a couple of things, but nowhere near what others i’ve known had learned.
On the flip side, when I was in my second year of undergrad, i had to take a dynamics course. The best way to describe what this class entails is imagine a skier going down a ski jump and are launched up into the air. We had to calculate the various velocities, angles, and the acceleration applied by the ramp, so REALLY fun stuff. I ended up taking it twice, and the second time was in the summer through a community college during the summer. When I took the course the instructor was an engineer for HP that taught the occasional course. He did an amazing job and yet at the same time didn’t make that big of a show of it. He kept things at an even pace, gave simple examples and then worked up to the difficult stuff as would be expected, but he stepped you through it in a way that you picked up the pattern to solve it. Unlike some classes, the homework and the exams were similar enough to each other that you weren’t trying to apply the methods in a way that you’d not experienced. It just clicked and I enjoyed it more than I did most of the basic engineering courses.
Looking at the two it’s like night and day. In the first, the instructors basically checked out and didn’t care and sort of just walked through the motions. They showed a technique, but didn’t actually have you go hands on so you couldn’t experience it yourself and then be tested through it. The second course made sure that you were getting the information well enough before going on. There were periodic quizzes and of course exams. And there i’ve somehow come to the conclusion that the Dynamics course was actually fun.
