Thanks to you students who have enrolled in this course. I hope you get everything out of it you want, and more.
As stated elsewhere, the focus of the course is to give students the knowledge and skills to build any aquarium equipment that you can dream up - oh and to build a slick kalkwasser reactor along the way.
A little about the format of this course...
Text
The "required reading" text of the class is an excellent manual/booklet written by Brian Ferguson (fergy), who taught the first two MACO Acrylic Fabrication courses.
Lessons
The course will have six weekly lessons, which will include reading from the text, a bit of the project, and whatever else I come up with
Chats
There will be a least one weekly chat session, which will be every Sunday, starting Feb 20, at 5pm Pacific, 8 PM Eastern, for two hours. I may hold a second chat session during the week as well.
The first thing I want to say about the chats is... if you miss any, don't worry! The chats are mainly an opportunity for the students to ask questions. All chat sessions will be logged, and available to all students for later viewing. If you miss a chat session, you will still have plenty of chances to have your own questions answered.
The chatroom will be open to students, starting sometime this week. It's a good idea to try to connect to chat well before the first chat session begins, to work through any technical issues. More will be posted about getting into chat very soon.
Forums
Another good place to ask questions is right here in the forums, which I will watch frequently.
Kits
The material packages "kits" will include wood (actually, MDF) templates, enough material (cut acrylic pieces, acrylic tube, PVC, misc parts, etc) to build one kalkwasser reactor. Most students should purchase a kit. Those who wish to purchase parts on their own can skip the kit. Buying your own parts will be a little more expensive, because of scale, but, it will give you experience in finding materials and parts, which will be very helpful for students intending to produce equipment in an ongoing basis. Those of you who wish to build the reactor, but buy your own parts, will still need to purchase the MDF templates. Please contact me directly regarding template sets. The price of the templates alone should be around $25.
The Project
One thing that students have done in the past, is to wait until later in course to actually start working on their own project. Choose your own pace for building the project. If you wait until the final weeks to start, you will gain the advantage of hearing about other students' experiences. The drawback in waiting is that you may not get as much out of the chats as you otherwise would.
I do recommend that you keep up on the reading and the lessons, as much as possible, so you can better understand the disccusions in the weekly chats as they happen.
Please feel free to ask questions of me or the MACO staff.
Bryan aka "ToeCutter"
As stated elsewhere, the focus of the course is to give students the knowledge and skills to build any aquarium equipment that you can dream up - oh and to build a slick kalkwasser reactor along the way.
A little about the format of this course...
Text
The "required reading" text of the class is an excellent manual/booklet written by Brian Ferguson (fergy), who taught the first two MACO Acrylic Fabrication courses.
Lessons
The course will have six weekly lessons, which will include reading from the text, a bit of the project, and whatever else I come up with
Chats
There will be a least one weekly chat session, which will be every Sunday, starting Feb 20, at 5pm Pacific, 8 PM Eastern, for two hours. I may hold a second chat session during the week as well.
The first thing I want to say about the chats is... if you miss any, don't worry! The chats are mainly an opportunity for the students to ask questions. All chat sessions will be logged, and available to all students for later viewing. If you miss a chat session, you will still have plenty of chances to have your own questions answered.
The chatroom will be open to students, starting sometime this week. It's a good idea to try to connect to chat well before the first chat session begins, to work through any technical issues. More will be posted about getting into chat very soon.
Forums
Another good place to ask questions is right here in the forums, which I will watch frequently.
Kits
The material packages "kits" will include wood (actually, MDF) templates, enough material (cut acrylic pieces, acrylic tube, PVC, misc parts, etc) to build one kalkwasser reactor. Most students should purchase a kit. Those who wish to purchase parts on their own can skip the kit. Buying your own parts will be a little more expensive, because of scale, but, it will give you experience in finding materials and parts, which will be very helpful for students intending to produce equipment in an ongoing basis. Those of you who wish to build the reactor, but buy your own parts, will still need to purchase the MDF templates. Please contact me directly regarding template sets. The price of the templates alone should be around $25.
The Project
One thing that students have done in the past, is to wait until later in course to actually start working on their own project. Choose your own pace for building the project. If you wait until the final weeks to start, you will gain the advantage of hearing about other students' experiences. The drawback in waiting is that you may not get as much out of the chats as you otherwise would.
I do recommend that you keep up on the reading and the lessons, as much as possible, so you can better understand the disccusions in the weekly chats as they happen.
Please feel free to ask questions of me or the MACO staff.
Bryan aka "ToeCutter"
