Jacob Hale

Background

About Jacob Hale

For 20 years, through the lens of physics, I've been teaching students how to figure out what nature is saying. I lead students through the process of making observations, asking questions and defining problems, designing experiments, and collecting the data that hides the answers. I then lead students to analyze the data with theoretical models and computational tools. I teach them to keep two things in mind: what does the data tell you about your experiment, and what does the data tell you to do next? This process repeats in an upward spiral of knowing. But nature, society, and technology are complex and present very ambiguous problems. Tackling such a problem today requires deep skills in a few areas and transferrable skills across many areas. Data problems, science problems, and technology problems require many skills to solve. I use and teach hard skills such as CAD design, fabrication, coding, statistics, modeling, descriptive analytics and predictive analytics. I also use and teach soft skills such as effective listening/information gathering, collaboration, compassion, team building, delegation, argumentation, and communication. Deep skills buttressed by broadly transferrable skills drives solutions to complex problems Deep skills without broadly transferrable skills lead to recipe following rather than recipe making. The latter is black-box thinking and leads to a roadblock when hit with the unknown, the ambiguous, the vague, or the ill defined problem. But these problems have the most important, interesting, and valuable solutions. I thrive in the world of the ambiguous problem! That is the environment I work to empower my students to thrive in because that is the real world.