The Student Becomes the Teacher!

So eventually the day came where the roles were reversed and we were the ones teaching the class. I felt quite calm coming up to it, I felt that we had immersed ourselves in enough information to handle any questions that people might of had afterwards and felt confident about our ability to present our teachings. We were one of the last people up to present which isn't ideal as I usually prefer to get it out of the way early before you can start to overthink things by seeing other people presenting, but you have to play the cards you're dealt.

When it was our turn to teach I thought we done quite well, we interacted with the class inquiring about their knowledge of gastrointestinal disorders and only briefly covered probiotics as we know they have previous knowledge in microbiology. Not many knew about kefir which was good for us because this is all new to them. Gave brief explanation of our experience with home brewing and moved onto our bioprocess design. For me I felt it was important that we shared our experience of disagreement over the bioprocess design and how we used the best of both glass and steel to come up with a solution for our problem, giving them insight into how we arrived to our final design and that it wasn't just straightforward. Our interactive game with the class in which we got them to identify the different ancillaries of the bioreactor design as we explain their purpose I felt worked well but was slower and took more time than I anticipated it would which ate into our allocated time. Finishing off handing out the miniature bottles of kefir water with our logo on it was a nice touch also in my opinion!

There were plenty of questions from the class about the product and the design, most of them kefir related but I was confident in my knowledge of answering all the questions that came and felt I answered them all quite well. There was no questioning from Barry at the end  (other than are you planning on starting a business!)  which I felt was a bit odd as we were the only group not to be quizzed. Not sure if that is a good or bad thing, I am going to be optimistic and say good thing and that it was because we had answered enough/all the questions that could be asked already in the Q&A after the presentation.

Comparing how I felt about having to present to our peers a couple of weeks ago and how I felt after it I'm really glad that I done it and found it really enjoyable, it definitely was worth doing and aided my learning as well as helped my confidence about presenting which will benefit me in my future endevours (especially if we go ahead and start up a business like Barry enquired!). It was also interesting seeing other peoples approach to teaching the class and the the diversity of the different bioprocesses picked and comparing them with ours.