This week I used the LINK system to help me remember vocabulary words in both my Representations class (ARC 181) and my Structures Class (ARC 121). I decided to use LINK because I am a visual learner and I thought creating visual imagery to coincide with important terms for both classes would be a big help for remembering exact definitions so I wouldn’t be confused when it came to the Representation project lectures and Structures test. One thing that I found difficult when using LINK was that the vocabulary words weren’t necessarily difficult words in themselves; it was just a specific definition of the word that I had to remember. For example, “Ventilation” was one of my vocab words for structures. Normally, one wouldn’t think that would even be a vocabulary word because the definition seems so obvious. But in my class, my professor refers to ventilation as a specific system that replenishes a well-insulated building with fresh, pre-heated or cooled outside air. Because the definition was so specific, and the word had a different common definition, it was difficult to think about what the word “looked like” and “sounded like” without being distracted by my pre-knowledge of the word. It was also difficult to not create images that were too complicated. It was hard for me to come up with images that didn’t make sense because I am a pretty rational person, and learning how to take a step back and crate images that didn’t necessarily make sense to me took some practice. However, I think the action of synthesizing the looks like/sounds like image with something that actually relates to the definition required the most imagination and helped me the most in the eventual memorization of the material.

I would say that this strategy of memorization works well for the way I learn, and it is definitely useful for a better understanding of the lectures, but I am still skeptical of exactly how useful this action will be towards getting a better grade on my Evaluations for either class. Because the material being tested on my exams and in my projects is not the vocabulary itself but the application of the vocabulary, I feel like a method that helps me relate the terms would have been more useful than the memorization of the term. Because the relationships are more of what is tested, I think creating graphic organizers has been the best way for me to remember the material and the most effective way for me to study for my evaluations.

Likewise, with my representations class, I was using LINK to help memorize the different applications and commands available on some of the computer programs that I have to learn. Instead of making up images describing the the way the command looked or sounded to remember the words definition, it would helped me more to draw pictures of exactly what the command does in each program since the words (for example: extrude, Planar Surface, join, Boolean, etc) all have common definitions that are applied differently in each program.