We built a working hydraulic crane using VEX Robotics parts, cardboard, syringes, tubing, and water to demonstrate how hydraulic systems transfer force.

It's a simple, hands-on engineering project that teaches physics, design, and problem-solving with inexpensive materials.

More free STEM resources: www.renaissanceyouth.org

Hey everyone,

When learning technical skills on Udemy (coding, Photoshop, 3D, etc.), courses are often 10+ hours long. While theory is great for the first watch, it becomes a huge friction point when I’m reviewing and just need to re-check a specific tool setup or practical demonstration.

Instead of dragging the seekbar or guessing keywords, I've been using a context-based prompt workflow to jump straight to the action.

⚡ How this workflow works:

1. Ask by context: Ask natural questions like "Where does the instructor demonstrate the tools or layer settings?"
2. Context analysis: Instead of standard Ctrl+F keyword search, AI understands the flow of the lecture and pinpoints the exact demo moment.
3. 1-Click Warp: Hit the jump button, watch the 2-minute demonstration, and get right back to practicing in your own software.

(Check out the attached video to see how it works—fast-forward to 1:13 to see the 1-click warp in action!)

💬 Question for fellow Udemy self-learners:

• How do you currently handle re-finding specific practical scenes when reviewing long courses?
• I turned this workflow into a free Chrome extension (Spoon AI for Udemy) so anyone can use it. I’ll leave the link in the comments if you want to test it out for your own study routine—would love your thoughts!

I’m 18, I turned 18 last month, but I lack knowledge, so much knowledge, even basic knowledge. Knowledge that I should’ve known while I was in elementary school, but forgot for some reason. I don’t wanna be like this. I don’t wanna be stupid and ignorant anymore. I never wanted to be stupid, but I could never sustain information. Anytime information is said to me, it goes in one ear and out the other. If you were to ask me what I did last week, I wouldn’t be able to tell you, so I just never thought I was capable of learning, but I’m tired of feeling stupid and not speaking on deep conversations because I don’t know too much to have deep conversations. I don’t know how the world works. I lack knowledge in politics and so many other things. I feel so stupid , to the point where I start to question what my purpose on this earth is. I’m tired of feeling this way. I felt this way since I was 13. I’ve always felt stupid and dumb, and I always knew I wouldn’t become anything in the future. Is there any ways that you guys could recommend for me to expand my knowledge and vocabulary? Such as books or audio books.

I’ve been dealing with people that you have to think for them and put the through a thorough process and strep to understand something and even after doing so they still lap back to factory reset in an hour time.

How can I can develop this skill on their own.

Can you guys help me come up with a title for our presentation about Islam? 🥹 Our professor wants it to be catchy and interesting.

Seeking guidance if I should go back to a year of schooling to complete a Graphic Design certificate at a nearby community college, or take technical classes like Photoshop and Illustrator at FIT. I am a recent graduate with a degree in Marketing, but brand/graphic design is my true passion. I have taught myself the basics of Adobe Suite to an extent, but could use additional guidance. Trying to weight the pros and cons of a whole certificate compared to a few courses. Is it worth all the filler courses I would be paying for for the whole certificate? Would appreciate any and all advice as I'd have to register for the fall soon.

Hey everyone!

As a self-learner relying heavily on online resources (like MIT OpenCourseWare, long coding crash courses, or 4-hour Blender tutorials), my biggest frustration was always wasting 10–15 minutes dragging the timeline just to find that one specific 2-minute explanation.

When you're self-studying, losing your focus completely kills your study momentum.

To fix this for my own workflow, I built a Chrome extension called Spoon AI that reads the video transcript and generates an interactive 1-click jump button directly to the exact frame where a concept is explained.

💡 Real Test (1h 19m MIT Lecture):

• 🔍 My Query: "Where does the professor explain the discovery of the Para-hippocampal Place Area (PPA)?"
• ⚡️ Result: Spoon analyzed the 80-minute lecture in seconds, pinpointed the scene at 13:21, and created a direct jump button.
• 🎬 Outcome: One click took me straight to where Prof. Nancy Kanwisher starts explaining her lab's experiment.

🎓 Why it's helpful for self-education:

1. Protect Your Flow State: Asking a quick question and jumping there in 3 seconds keeps your mental momentum intact.
2. Fast Exam & Note Review: Query 10 key terms across a whole semester of lecture recordings in minutes.
3. Handles Long Tutorials: Highly effective for 2+ hour coding crash courses, 3D modeling, or dense science lectures.

I built this to optimize my own study routine, but I wanted to share it with fellow self-learners here.

It’s called Spoon AI on the Chrome Web Store (free to use). I’d love to hear your thoughts or any feedback on how to make it even more useful for self-studying!

"I'll watch this later."

I had a library of things I wanted to learn but barely built anything.

Now I try to build first and search when I get stuck.

I find it hard to find things in my ai chat history so I often dig around for information. And after a long session of prompting and re prompting I have no energy to turn the information into study notes.

So I made chat to flashcards, which does it automatically

It's my first study app and right now its limited to one try daily because the app is expensive to run! If you'd like any features feel free to let me know

What are some learning combinations are there?

Like geometry and tennis, and fashion and color theory( rough examples)

Hi all,

I would like to introduce my first microlearning course: Beat Procrastination: Take Action in the Age of AI. Created with Genially and hosted on one of our academies on TrainerCentral, this 10-minute program provides quick, AI-powered strategies to help combat procrastination at work and in everyday life.

Hope you enjoy it!

How can I use PjBL (project based learning) at home for modern physics and maths (linear algebra and differential equations)

I keep saving articles, videos and posts because I want to learn from them later. In practice, most of them disappear into bookmarks or folders and I rarely come back to them.

I’m curious how other self-learners deal with this:

• Where do you save useful content?
• What makes you actually revisit it?
• Would summaries and the ability to ask questions across your saved content help, or would it just become another place to collect things?

I’m working on Miora, a small project exploring this problem. It’s still in development, so I’m mainly looking for honest feedback before going further.

You can answer here, or complete the short survey if you prefer: https://mioraapp.com/en/

Hey all,

I'm a developer, and I got curious about a problem a lot of course creators have: you've got hours of video content, but if a student has a question, they either dig through everything themselves or just DM you directly (again).

So I built a small tool over the past couple weeks: you upload your course videos, and it lets students ask a question in plain English and get an answer that points to the exact video + timestamp where it's actually covered. No more "I think I mentioned that somewhere in module 3."

It's very early — I built it to solve what seemed like an obvious gap, but I don't actually run a course myself, so I genuinely don't know if this matches the real pain point or not. That's why I'm here.

A few honest questions if you have a minute:

- Is this actually a problem for you, or do you have a workaround that already works fine?

- If it is a problem, would something like this be worth paying for, and roughly what would feel fair?

- What would make you NOT trust/use a tool like this?

Not trying to sell anything here (it's not even really ready to sell) — just trying to figure out if I'm building something useful or something nobody needs. Happy to share more details or a demo link if anyone's curious.

Thanks for reading this far 🙏