My primary drive is to have a positive impact on the state of instruction and instructional technology. My experience includes time at Princeton University, Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, Carnegie Mellon, and the University of Texas, right up the street.
I remember the first program I wrote. It solved a physics equation from on my father's books.
Solving this for increasing values of produced a lot of numbers. However, to extract meaning from the data I wanted to see a visual representation of the data. We had a printing terminal, so I built a graphics capability for it. This means figuring out what an axis should look like, building it from -'s |'s and +'s, and how to position *'s to represent the data.
It is a powerful testament to active learning that I remember doing this 45 years later.
This also expresses the value of multiple representation, something we will also touch on later.