Integrative Learning

Integrative learning in my own words in when a person can take what they've learned from all of their classes and apply all of that knowledge into a single project or activity. Integrative learning can be applied to many parts of life even after College education. When working for a company you will have to work as a team to solve problems in the real world. These real world problems may need experience in multiple areas of education to produce a good deliverable.

An example of Integrative Learning would be the Capstone project for our First Year Seminar class. In this project we had to apply whay we know about citation, piracy, and coding to form a citation generator that met the expectations of our client Sean Britt. Teamwork was essential for this project to work well because there were many parts to complete before the deadline at the end of the semester. For instance, I was mostly working on the presentation of our code and what it took to plan the development of our program. Another group member would work on the actual code of the program while another would research how the formatting of the citation can change it's effectiveness.

A screenshot of our citation generator running.

Another example of Integrative Learning during this semester was the game I made for Game Design called Space Janitor. Using what I've learned from Game Design and my knowledge of C++ to put together a rough prototype of my game Space Janitor. While it still has it's bugs (touching the ghost crashes the game) I was able to use my C++ knowledge to understand the C# scripts enough to make some of the additions I wanted. The game design part of it was tricky, I had to experiment with different goals and what the winning condition should be. How the player interacts with the User Interface was also an element in the design of the game. My own lack of knowledge restricts some of the features I want to the defaults set by Unity Playground. With more experimentation and learning I will be able to improve my game further. For now it's going to be a little buggy and featureless.

Over this semester I've had multiple projects that require some amount of Integrative Learning. Developing a citation generator for an English class required some research into citations and what they do and needed knowledge in C++ to write a program. Making a video game required knowledge into good game design, user interface, and user experience as well as the programming knowledge to make them into a game. In a future career, what I've learned won't be separated to different rooms in a school. When working a job I'll be using all that I've learned in order to solve problems.