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Dr. Han Dongkun is currently a lecturer at the Department of Mechanical and Automation Engineering, The Chinese University of Hong Kong. He earned his Ph.D. degree in electrical and electronic engineering from The University of Hong Kong. From 2014 to 2016, he was a research scientist at the Department of Informatics, Technical University of Munich, Germany. From 2016 to 2017, he was a research fellow at the Department of Aerospace Engineering, the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, United States. He now teaches three General Education courses: UGEB1307 Energy and Green Society, UGEB2303 Robots in Action, and GENA1113 Student-Oriented Teaching and Seminar. One of his recent projects is based on UGEB2303 Robots in Action and develops a mobile APP for assisting students to make their first robot. He is also focusing on implementing "flipped classroom" in General Education. He takes an active role in improving students' presentation skills. He was the chairman of blue toastmasters at the Technical University of Munich, and has organized several workshops to better students' communication skills at CUHK.
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Teaching Philosophy
Why do I Choose to be a Teacher?
To answer this question, I would like to borrow the words from Wislawa Szymborska, "There is, has been, and will always be a certain group of people whom inspiration visits. It is made up of all those who have consciously chosen their calling and do their job with love and imagination. Their work becomes one continuous adventure as long as they manage to keep discovering new challenges in it." For me, teaching is the chosen calling, providing me with endless love, imagination, passion, and satisfaction. Time and time again, this scenario comes to me that an old course instructor, after decades in classroom, still strives to ask how he could use cutting-edge technologies to inspire students. Probably, that is why teaching is amazing to me.
Conceptualization of Teaching
Knowledge can be communicated, but not wisdom; the latter is the capability to get knowledge and use it wisely. Therefore, transmitting knowledge is important, while a more significant role of teaching lies in the efforts on inspiring students to learn, facilitating students to learn, and pointing out the way through which students can learn further and faster. Based on this understanding, more efforts are devoted to providing public seminars to facilitate students to learn, e.g., seminar on introducing search engines for literature review.
Teaching Methodology
New technologies and devices are deployed to get students more engaged in the teaching materials. Some of the strategies about General Education course design are listed as follows.
- eLearning with a tablet and real robots: In the course UGEB 2303 Robots in Action, an interactive learning environment is created by using mobile applications with a robotic arm, where students can learn basic definitions and fundamental concepts of robots. By using a tablet or their mobile phones, students could also check the change of parameters from time to time by changing the position and angles of the robotic arm. In addition, to control a wheeled robot, different tasks are designed for students and enable them to face, analyze, and solve these practical problems as mechanical engineers, e.g., in order to allow the robot to track a dashed line, students are asked to propose a control strategy for the robot, write corresponding programming codes to valid their strategy, and adjust the control parameters by trial-and-error as a real mechanical engineer.
- Playing games is an important part in my teaching: Two types of games are usually employed in lectures to help students become more engaged in the learning materials and understand the basic concepts better. For example, the "role play game" allows students to act in different roles under a pre-defined mechanism introduced in the lecture. In the course UGEB1307 Energy and Green Society, students play in roles like electron, atom, and photon to further understand the mechanism behind solar photovoltaics.
- Learning cutting-edge technology by using new media: Videos from YouTube and Facebook are widely used to facilitate teaching and learning, especially in introduction of new technologies.
Besides innovative course design, teaching and learning activities are also provided for a better learning outcome as follows.
- Study tours: For UGEB2303 Robots in Action, a study tour to T Stone Robotics Institute of CUHK is organized for broadening the horizon of students who come without any background in technology. In addition, to engage students of UGEB1307 Energy and Green Society in active reflections on energy crisis and making connections between what they learn in classes with their daily life, a study tour to the Jockey Club Museum of Climate Change at CUHK is provided.
- Special seminar on improving students' presentation skills: For the courses UGEB1307 Energy and Green Society, UGEB2303 Robots in Action, and GENA1113 Student-Oriented Teaching and Seminar, extra seminars are provided for improving the students' presentation skills. The first part of this seminar focuses on how the students can make good-looking slides. The second part is concerned with various categories of skills to give an effective presentation, like body language, voice, clothing, team presentation, and design of presentation.
- Outdoor lecture at New Asia College Plaza: For the course GENA1113 Student-Oriented Teaching and Seminar, a special outdoor lecture is given at New Asia College Plaza. In this lecture, students in different teams provide a no-slide presentation, and each presentation is followed by a very interactive question-and-answer section. The outdoor lecture enables students to focus on the basics of conveying learning and interactions.
As time passes, these new technologies and ideas may fade out, but never will my chosen calling; I will continue to strive to provide effective teaching and make my students as well as myself a finer learner and thinker.
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