Blog Assignment #7

Randy Pausch Last Lecture: Achieving Your Childhood Dreams
In this video, Randy Pausch talks about achieving your childhood dreams. He talked about the dreams he had growing up as a child of wanting to be in zero gravity, play in the NFL, write an article for the encyclopedia, become Captain Kirk, winning stuffed animals, and working as a Disney imagineer. Most of these he was able to accomplish and for the few that were impossible he was successful in doing something closely related. He details all of the things he gained chasing these dreams and all of the positive experiences along the way. Pausch also tells stories of his triumphs and struggles as progressed through his academic career. He relates every story to main points that he believes are essential to help getting through life. Pausch also alludes to what he calls "head fakes," which are points of hidden deeper meaning or understanding and life learning lessons.

My favorite part of the lecture was when Dr. Pausch was showing off the work of his students in the building virtual worlds class that he created. The projects were very interesting and entertaining. It's amazing to think how far virtual reality has come since then. I was really intrigued by his stories about teaching the class and it makes me wish I was able to take it.

I think it's awesome that virtual reality and tools such as second life can be used to teach. Watching this video made me think of an interesting way to teach holistic health to students. It would be interesting to take a class and assign each student a number of virtual avatars such as sims characters. These characters would live in a world thats physics mimic our own and all have various degrees of health problems and issues. The objective of the class would be to take the avatars and design healthful training and nutrition regimes to encourage the avatars to reach their optimum levels of health.

Overall I really enjoyed this presentation. Randy Pausch is an excellent speaker and amazing person. It's unfortunate that he had to leave the earth the way he did, but he made it a better place while he was here.