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In this episode of The Engineering Commons podcast, we talk with civil engineer Grady Hillhouse, producer of YouTube’s Practical Engineering channel.
- Carmen has been known to wield a reciprocating saw as he refines his woodworking skills.
- Our guest for this episode is Grady Hillhouse, a professional civil engineer from Austin, Texas who runs the Practical Engineering channel on YouTube.
- Grady spends much of his professional time working on dams and hydraulic structures.
- Extending his early woodworking videos, Grady first dabbled in the area of engineering outreach with a YouTube video describing a dams and reservoirs exhibit that he built for a kindergarten class taught by his wife.
- Another Career Day demonstration built by Grady was an exhibit explaining tuned mass dampers.
- Grady reveals that his video narrations are almost completely scripted, and that it takes about a month for him to produce a new video.
- In producing his videos, Grady makes use of the following software tools: Vegas, Audacity, Inkscape, and Gimp.
- Grady’s video about mechanically stabilized earth has garnered over half a million views.
- One of the more challenging projects undertaken by our guest has been a DIY Watt Balance.
- The Hydraulic Press channel released a video of mechanically stabilized earth being crushed, with a hat tip to the Practical Engineering channel.
- Grady mentions the Hyatt Regency walkway collapse as a topic he’d like to cover in a future video.
- Our guest likes watching Ben Krasnow’s Applied Science channel, Destin Sandlin’s Smarter Every Day, Cody Reeder’s adventures on Cody’s Lab, Marc Spagnuolo’s Wood Whisperer, machining on Clickspring and This Old Tony, woodworking with Frank Howarth, John Heisz, Matthias Wandel, and Izzy Swan, and the AvE channel (NSFW). He also enjoys listening to the 99% Invisible podcast.
- Listeners can go to 11foot8.com to see videos of trucks losing their battles with a low overpass bridge in Durham, North Carolina.
- Carmen mentions an interview with Forrest Mims from The Amp Hour podcast.
- Grady describes the River Analysis System software put out by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.
- Listeners wishing to contact Grady can find an email address on his website: practical.engineering.
Thanks to Grady Hillhouse for use of the Practical Engineering logo. Opening music by John Trimble, and concluding theme by Paul Stevenson.
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We talk about context and learning with Chris Gammell, founder of the Contextual Electronics series of instructional videos.
- Adam’s favorite lab course in school was Bituminous Materials, which investigated the properties and characteristics of asphalt.
- Our guest, Chris Gammell, recently tweeted about Christmas Ale from the Great Lakes Brewing Company, and we inquire about his affection for this particular beer.
- Chris took a few photos inside the brewery during a recent tour:
- A list of Christmas beers (from a few years back) can be found on the Draft Magazine website.
- Jeff mentions a cooling jacket for brewing lagers that he originally saw on Kickstarter.
- Chris has recently launched a venture, Contextual Electronics, which aims to teach practical skills to those interested in electronics.
- An interactive teaching method, known as Peer Instruction, was created by Harvard Physics professor Eric Mazur to overcome the difficulty that experts have in teaching concepts to beginners.
- A book titled How to Teach Adults provided our guest with some insights about how to organize his instructional material.
- Chris surveyed listeners of The Amp Hour podcast to determine what subject matter should be included in his instructional videos.
- Some existing online resources, in the area of electronics, include Dave Jones’ EEVblog, the Curious Inventor website, and videos by Ben Krasnow, Jeri Elsworth and Alan Wolke.
- Conceptual Electronics is using the open source program KiCad for designing printed circuit boards (PCBs).
- Massive open online courses (MOOCs) are currently a popular topic in the education community.
- Chris has been working with a beta-test group of students to smooth out the rough edges of the course.
- Our guest took inspiration from instructional programs such as Destroy All Software and cadjunkie.
- Fedevel Academy offers a training program for Altium Designer.
- An introductory video program titled Getting to Blinky is available on the Contextual Electronics YouTube channel.
- Chris is quite pleased with his experiences using Vimeo for video distribution. He has already produced 150 videos for his instructional program.
- On a monthly basis, Chris gets together with the Charged Conversation group, comprised of electronics professionals from the Cleveland, Ohio area.
- One of our guest’s sources for marketing ideas is Seth Godin, who often talks about the power of story-telling.
- A project dedicated to creating all the tools needed to build a small village is Open Source Ecology.
- More information about Chris’s instructional program is available on the Contextual Electronics website.
- You can follow Chris on Twitter as @Chris_Gammell, and can listen to his weekly podcast with Dave Jones at The Amp Hour.
Thanks to Chris Gammel for allowing us to use a screen grab from one of his introductory videos as the main image for this episode. Podcast theme music provided by Paul Stevenson
Practical insights for the engineering crowd
