Emergent Final Reflections

5 min readDec 9, 2020

Knowledge Gained

In my time in Emergent with Travis I learned a great deal about new technologies as well as myself. To start, I feel I gained immense understand of what AR, VR, XR, and MR are and I feel like I could easily describe them to a family member and they would understand the basics. I also feel comfortable with Spark AR and how to roughly navigate around it. I am no expert on it but I can understand terminology, icons within the software, and how to export my creations. In terms of what I learned at a personal level is mainly that I can have great perseverance. I honestly wasn’t sure I had it in me to keep going and complete assignments and catch up but somehow I kept checking things off.

Improvement

This being said, I feel I have lots of room to improve. I did end up not finishing every assignment in the class. If I could have a redo I would tell myself that I need to communicate and not hold everything in. If I had communicated properly with Travis I could have gotten a handle on my missing work. So something I can improve on in the future in my classes and future career is to not be afraid to reach out and communicate better when things don’t go exactly right. Another area I have to improve is with using medium and creating better thought out medium posts. I struggled to figure out quite how Medium works and so, in my opinion, my posts don’t have quite as much WOW as my fellow classmates.

Course Content

In terms of class content and material I felt it was well thought out. I enjoyed the time to complete assignments and I thought there was a good amount of time in between assignments where I was learning but also having a break. I also liked the Spark tutorial and felt they were easy to follow and I wasn’t too overwhelmed on a majority of them. The best part of the class hands down was Travis’ enthusiasm. I always looked forward to the class as he was thrilled about teaching us these concepts. Part of the reason I was able to catch up on missing work was due to his enthusiasm and I got excited to learn and understand these concepts. While the class was wonderful and I learned a great deal there are some things I could see changing to really enhance the experience to the max. I think it would be really beneficial if every once in a while Travis could go over some stuff in Spark as he indicated he has done the tutorials himself and is familiar with the program. I don’t think he should do the tutorial in one class sitting as I appreciated being able to pause the video tutorial to take my time. But, I think if he could introduce the program so the class could get used to some of the base terminology and ask questions live than I think jumping into the tutorials would be even easier. I also think making sure the Spark tutorials are up to date. A lot of things are different in the tutorials vs the current software. Some of the steps are pointless as Spark automatically clicks the button you are supposed to. Or sometimes the content to download isn’t available anymore. I know this caused a lot of frustration and I often felt I wasn’t good enough to use the program. And it was hard looking anything up when I didn’t have a full grasp on exactly what I wanted to say. I did like the challenge of not knowing what exactly to do and having to find the answers and when I did I felt really knowledgable. But sometimes it was too much and ended up hindering my learning.

Best Parts

Hands down the best part of the class was Travis. As stated earlier, I learned so much more due to his enthusiasm. I have been in classes that go the full time with a teacher that doesn’t seem to care about their material and I don’t learn anything. But with even 30 mins Travis makes me learn information. Another part is that Travis is compassionate and is open to mistakes. He allows all his students to be creative and make mistakes and mess up because in the end we all learn something from making mistakes. I have professors in the past state they want boundaries to be pushed, bigger risks taken in my designs, and to not be afraid to get a little crazy. But when I try to follow that advice I get marked down. But that is not Travis’ philosophy and it made for a memorable class.

Worst Parts

The worst part of the class, apart from Covid, was honestly my own personal struggles. Falling behind due to personal circumstances was very hard. I felt rushed to complete assignments so I don’t think I learned as much as I possible could.

Future

Through the ups and downs, hardships and triumphs I took a lot out of this class. I know I can apply the knowledge I learned into the future. Due to this class, I now have a leg up from other job applicants that I have first hand knowledge of creating AR effects. I have a working group project that utilizes AR tracking technology. In terms of that projects I can show my skills in working with a group and collaborating. These are just to name a few things I can take away from this class.