Reflective summary – new journey

First contact

When I first saw the introduction of this course, I was very confused, frightened, worried that I would not be able to complete the homework. However, after first class, all these worries disappeared. Teacher divided us into multiple groups to discuss how to design the blog website. We became closer to each other while we expressed our ideas which laid a great foundation for the smooth development of other group courses.

Figure 1: blog banner（source from Menghua Ni）

Further learning

It is a new thing for me to publish a blog. This course pushed me to understand a field that I had never been exposed to before and gain a unique perspective  to observe urban design expertise. All of us come from all different countries around the world,  with different races, cultures, habits, and experience backgrounds…… That means each of us use accustomed and comfortable way when we write our blogs. Through their words, I could easily understand their thoughts from their perspective which help me to broad my thinking method. It is a great way help me to understand the different countries culture as well as to bring classmates’ closer relationship.

I chose two themes which called child friendly urban design and smart city to write my blog. Because at the beginning of the semester, i listened an interesting lecture which the lecturer showed us how cities that focus on child friendly development develop, which deeply attracted my attention. Therefore, I hope to gain a deeper understanding of how child-friendly cities work through this course; The reason why I chose smart city is that i had hardly heard of this word during my university studies which made me very curious about smart city. What is smart city? How will it guide the planning and development of a city? There are lots of questions bothered me, so I decided to find the answers by myself.

When I began to write my blog, I was like a little bee flying around and didn’t know where to start. Fortunately in the subsequent courses, the teacher explained to us what conditions a good blog needs to have and showed us some excellent blogs by classmates which really helped me to write the blog. In addition, the teacher also select some students’ blogs to comment and point out their shortcomings. I was lucky that my blog was selected because he gave me a lot of great suggestions, such as expressing opinions in multiple paragraphs, using cases to support blog ideas, adding pictures to make the article more interesting, and adding pictures and literature notes to make the blog more professional…… all of them helped me a lot.

Reward

In this course, I fully expressed my thoughts on urban design. Besides, blogging has further improved my writing skills and ability to search and summarize information. I hope that I can make full use of the knowledge that I learned in the class to help my next professional courses and be able to create better urban living conditions for my hometown in the future.