Randy Pausch's Last Lecture

My post for today is going to be about Randy Pausch's Last Lecture which I just recently watched. This lecture was just so moving and so inspirational on so many levels. Randy Pausch was a professor at Carnegie Mellon University. He died on July 25, 2008 having suffered from pancreatic cancer. He clearly advocated living your life to the fullest and going after your dreams, no matter how far-fetched or out of reach they may be. He started his lecture out talking about his childhood dreams and then moved on and talked about how to enable others to reach their childhood dreams.

Randy Pausch's Last Lecture started out with Randy discussing some of his childhood dreams some of which were playing for the NFL, becoming an Imagineer for Disney, and being a published author in the World Book Encyclopedia with a few others also. He discussed how he wasn't afraid to go after these dreams. One thing I liked was that he wasn't afraid to even laugh at himself. One of his other childhood dreams was "Being Captain Kirk", which when some people see this they probably just want to laugh because some would say "who wants to be Captain Kirk"? I think he pointed out something very interesting though; all of the others on Star Trek such as Spok and a few others he named all had some special talent that just made them so great, but what was so special about Captain Kirk? He didn't have a special talent, but he had the quality of leadership which put him on top of all of the others. Well, of course Randy couldn't become Captain Kirk, but he did meet him (well he met William Shatner who played Captain Kirk) and so he settled for that as meeting his childhood dream. Randy Pausch went after his dreams and he achieved them which is so inspirational in itself.

The lecture continued on with Randy talking about how to enable others to achieve their dreams which also tied in with him being a professor as well. He believed in helping others dream, and believed in helping others achieve those dreams no matter what they might have been. One of his starting stories was about a student named Tommy that he had at the University of Virginia. Tommy wanted to work on Randy's research team and told Randy that his childhood dream was to work on the next Star Wars films. This occurred around 1993, and when he was told this Randy told Tommy he didn't think those films would probably ever be made, and Tommy looked at him and said "No, they are." Needless to say, Tommy worked on those Star Wars films and fulfilled his childhood dream. Randy Pausch said he couldn't just settle for helping one individual at a time do this, he wanted to help large numbers at a time. When he was teaching at Carnegie Mellon he started up the "Building Virtual Worlds" course which held around 50 students at a time and began the process of helping many students achieve their dreams. In this course and with all of his teaching he implemented the "head-fake" teaching method. A "head-fake" is when you are teaching someone something when they think they are learning something else. The students in this course were learning to build virtual worlds, but at the same time were learning all about computer programming and many other aspects to go along with that. The course turned out to be a huge success all around the college because it incorporated every single department at the college which is something very rarely done. It continues on after Randy's passing in the hands of someone he handed it off to who he believed would have a lot of success with it.

Randy Pausch left so many legacies behind, not only with his course mentioned above but with the Entertainment Technology Center he co-founded with Don Marinelli at CMU, and also his ALICE project. He founded the ALICE project which is a software program which also uses the "head-fake" method; the students are just making things (worlds and storylines) on the computer, while actually learning all about computer programming. Even though he never really got to see the project take off he also left it in capable hands so I'm sure it has become a major success.

Randy Pausch, I think, is an inspiration to everyone. From future and current educators to the dreamer in all of us, I think there are some valuable lessons to be learned from his lecture. He taught, created, and lived a fulfilled life, and I think all of us could take his words and improve our lives to helping and enabling others to achieve their dreams.