Randy Paush

Randy Paush's Last Lecture was very inspirational. I thought growing up that you had to achieve your childhood dreams quickly and then get new "adult" dreams. But Randy showed that you can be any age and achieve your childhood dreams. I like the fact that he shared one of his dreams that did not come true, playing in the NFL. But he right in that sometimes the dreams you don' get teach you more than the one that you do get. I love the quote he gave, " experience is what you get when you didn't get what you wanted."

Randy also had many great points about how to reach your teaches and how to enable others to do the same. He said that you have to bring something to the table, you can't just sit there and let others do the work or hope it happens. One of my favorite concepts was " head fake." I knew of the concept but now it has a name. Get people to learn something hard by doing something fun. I also realized that it is true when he said that people need permission to dream. Many times in school we taught to follow certain rules even for creative projects to to completely free to dream can be a foreign idea.

While teaching Paush set up several different programs to help others reach their dreams. The first was simply a coarse offered called Building Virtual Worlds. It enabled students to have almost complete freedom when creating their worlds (no shooting violence or pornography). I loved when he was told by his mentor not to set a bar for the students and that we actually inhibit them by setting a standard. We should also be pushing students to have better ideas. Another project was ETC that was a masters degree that based on virtual reality projects, but it pushed students and made them better. They made lots of Edutainment videos that taught concepts while having fun. The program was such a success that companies were promising the students jobs before they were even done. His last project is ALICE that enables young students to learn computer programming though making videos.

Paush said that an important thing is that students need to be taught what it is like to help others achieve their dreams. It can be a greater reward than achieving your own. He also made a point that people have to help you, you can't do it on your own. My favorite thing and to me the most encouraging is to never lose the child-like wonder in life.