Milestone 1: Creating My LITicorn! (A Soft Circuit Toy)
Today’s LearningShip has reached its first big destination! After exploring the islands of mindset and self-efficacy, I have finally sailed towards entering the land of luminous creatures. In this video, I talk about how I worked on creating a soft toy that lights up.
Having started my work haphazardly, I set a time limit for how long I will be spending in order to do this project. However, I limited myself to just the time consideration and this ended up being counterproductive for my success.
(10/20) Destination 2: The City of Mindset
As LearningShip approaches its second destination, we tour around this city to learn what streets we should walk on and what streets we should avoid. Through this little ‘metaphorical’ tour, the ship sailor talks about her experience with the city of Mindset and connects it to her experiences at the Fimbel Lab.
(10/18) Destination 1: Self-efficacy with a Chameleon
The first stop for the sailing ship of MumtazLearns is a futuristic island hidden from passive sailing ships. Here, I stop by with one creative traveler, Sullivan, who has worked on documenting a part of a chameleon’s journey.
As I see how Sullivan had documented the journey of this shy chameleon in a creative way, I feel excited but intimidated at the same time. I realize that the level of creativity and skill required to make something as intriguing as Sullivan’s project might not be something I would be able to achieve.
However, I take inspiration from the shy chameleon’s journey itself. When the shy chameleon can overcome his fear of talking to people, I can also learn to design a project idea on my own without worrying about it being perfect. As I continue my conversation with this traveler, I learn more about how I can build on my own self-efficacy.
Setting Reasonable Expectations
I believe that I should set realistic standards of what I can do v/s what I need more help in. Assuming that I should be perfect in all spheres and skills would waste my mental energy and would prevent me from truly enjoying learning.
I must be gentle to myself and not get persuaded by what others have accomplished in the same field where I’m still a beginner. I’ve never had the experience of working with hardware and I feel underconfident working on the components that we might be using for this course. This does result in me lowering my levels of self-efficacy, but I should remember that taking this course in itself is a small accomplishment for me because I’m taking the initiative to push myself far out of my comfort zone.
Preventing Excessive Social Comparison
Setting metrics for measuring my progress while looking at other’s standards is a super efficient way of setting myself up for failure. I should learn to recognize what different skills I have developed and situations I have experienced that led me to be a student at this institution.
So it is important that I set my own learning goals and measure them according to my metrics. At the end of the day, I would not want my ship to sail simply with the flow, but also learn how to sail it on my own.