Randy Brooks is an Associate Professor of Practice at Texas A&M College of Engineering and Texas A&M Engineering Academy at Blinn College, Brenham
Randy Brooks is an Associate Professor of Practice at Texas A&M College of Engineering and Texas A&M Engineering Academy at Blinn College, Brenham. A unique initiative of Texas A&M, the Engineering Academy, makes engineering degrees more affordable and accessible for students unable to move to College Station immediately.
Brooks is passionate about deploying ITS (Intelligent Tutoring Systems) in his classrooms, which reflects his student-centered teaching approach. He draws on Robert Gagne’s Nine Events of Instruction to develop his lessons, grounded in both instructional and learning science.
To promote student mastery of concepts, he manages his courses to encourage students to resubmit artifacts until they demonstrate mastery. Students are encouraged to construct their growth mindset by developing teamwork skills and learning through discovery.
Brooks has presented on the tool Mechanix at the 2016 CPTTE (Conference on Pen & Touch Technology in Education) at Brown University, the 2016 PLTW Summit in Indianapolis, and the 2016 PLTW-Texas Convention in Houston. He has also worked on a paper for CPTTE 2016 “Randy Brooks, Jung In Koh, Seth Polsley, and Tracy Hammond. Score Improvement Distribution When Using Sketch Recognition Software (Mechanix) as a Tutor: Assessment of a High School Classroom Pilot, Frontiers in Pen and Touch, Chapter 11, Springer, 2017.”
In 2022, Brooks was named the Texas A&M Fish Camp Namesake. In 2021 he was elected as the ASEE-GSW Secretary and TAMU Faculty Senate Academic Professional Track Faculty Committee Member. In addition to serving as an external reviewer on the Blinn College Institutional Review Board (IRB), he also served as an external reviewer for TAMU’s Provost APT Teaching Excellence award.