My Name Is Zachary Slaybaugh, and I am a Freshman at Millersville just starting my college journey. I came to Millersville to have a better opportunity playing hockey as opposed to my situation where I was before at St. Joes. My goal for me here at Millersville is to maintain a 2.25 GPA so that way I can remain eligible to play hockey for the team. Hockey is a nice motivation for me to want to do all my schoolwork and all my school work well so I can remain eligible for the team. As for my long term goals, I am studying journalism here and media productions that way I can hopefully work in the world of hockey someday when my time at Millersville is over. My dream and goal as a kid was to always be a broadcaster or journalist for a hockey team and I would love to be able to accomplish that dream and that’s why I am here and pursuing that dream at Millersville.
With our Learning By Doing class coming to an end I feel as though I have learned so much through this class. Since I am not a technology major like a lot of people that go to school here I have never really had any previous experience with a lot of the things we did in this class. I never took any technical classes in high school so pretty much everything we have done in this class has been brand new to me. While I haven’t had very much experience in any of the work we have done in this class previously, I have really enjoyed getting to work hands on everyday and learn a lot of new skills. All the assignments and things we have learned in this class have been very beneficial and interesting and I have really enjoyed learning a lot of new skills. We have worked with a lot of cool software’s and created a lot of really cool projects that I have really enjoyed. That is what I feel like has been so special to me about this class, is it has given me the opportunity to do a lot of cool things I never would have been able to do before without the hands on opportunities from this class.
Our First activity we did in this class came the first time we were in the computer lab. It was typography and I thoroughly enjoyed learning and working with typography. I never realized what all went in to every font that we use in every area of life. For us it is so easy for us to just click on any font that we want whenever we want it but we don’t always appreciate and think about how that font was created and all the time and energy that went into creating that font for us to use so easily. So for me I was pretty fascinated and blown away by learning hoe the different point sizes were created and how the creation of font measurements came to be.
This was our first assignment that we had to complete where we tested out a bunch of fonts for typography. I thought it was a fun an easy assignment and I enjoyed working in adobe for the first time.
The Laser engraving activity was the 2nd activity we did and that was easily my favorite for sure. I loved the creativity that we got to display and I just really found the laser engraver art to be really cool. Getting to work in Adobe and create my very own design for what I wanted to put on my keychain was very cool. I ended up getting to create a little keychain for my girlfriend which she really liked because of all the freedom we were allowed with what we wanted to do.
Below, is the actual laser engravement artwork that I was able to do as you can see I am very happy with the results and how it came out. I loved how I got to choose whatever I wanted to put on it and I love the font I choose and the simple yet clean look of the keychain I made!
The next thing we got to do in class was 3D print a Lego brick, and I also found this assignment to be very fun because it was new to me I had never done anything or worked with a 3D printer before, so it was completely new to me and I thought it was a really cool process! I was really fascinated at how you can build and create anything with a 3D printer and while all we made was just a little Lego brick it was still a really fun process to work in the software and get to design one of my own.
Below, once again is a picture of my finished Lego brick. While the actual brick that was printed out wasn’t the one that I actually designed it still almost feels like it is my reward because I worked really hard within the software to create a Lego brick model. And while it would have taken to long to be able to print out all of our individual bricks I still feel just as accomplished because of all the work I did in the software to design it.
And the computer lab assignments weren’t the only hands on assignments that we actually got to do when we were in class in person. The class was called learning by doing which meant just about everyday we had some sort of activity going on. The first one we did revolved around typography, and familiarizing ourselves with the point scale. We were able to use actually typography font blocks and measure them out to see what the true size of them was. After typography it was materials processing which is where we worked with the laser engraver to carve out our keychains! Once we finished the keychain we did our construction assignment in class and it was one of my favorites. We were tasked with trying to hold up a 2 liter of soda with nothing but a hole puncher and a piece of paper. we had to try and find a way to make the paper somehow strong enough to be able to hold up the half filled bottle of soda. Eventually my group was finally able to reach this goal but I found it to be a very fun and challenging task and I enjoyed getting to work hard at it. Then we did 3D printing and that was the project in which we got to design and create our very own Lego brick. After that the last assignment we ended with was electronics. We had to create 3 different light switches out of materials like a thumb tack, paper clip, wires, and a light bulb, and tape. This was another fun and interesting challenge that really got the brain engaged and working to be able to try and find a solution to the task. And unfortunately I was sick and out for a whole week of class and missed the workplace safety activity, I was bummed to be able to miss that activity because it looked like a very fun challenge and another difficult task that was expected to be completed.
Below is a video attached of the workplace safety activity that I unfortunately didn’t get to participate in since I was home sick.
In conclusion, while this class was a little bit difficult and challenging at times I loved and enjoyed the hands on aspects of this class. I really enjoyed how engaging it was as it felt like every single day we were coming i and had something new to do. And for someone who like me is a hands on learner and loves to experiment with things I found it to be a really awesome class for me. All the different activities we did were really fun and I loved how we were able to take some things with us, while some of the activities were a little bit difficult and challenging for me since coming into this class I never had much experience with any of the stuff we did. I am proud of my self and feel accomplished with myself for trying new things and working hard to accomplish new things that I had never done before. So in all I really enjoyed this class and all that came with it. It was a lot of fun and I love hands on classes in which we get
Safety Engineering 2
Uploaded by donnampainter on 2025-04-29.
