{"id":343,"date":"2009-09-14T13:30:15","date_gmt":"2009-09-14T13:30:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.wabash.edu\/fyi\/2009\/09\/14\/video-cameras-in-physics-class\/"},"modified":"2009-09-14T13:30:15","modified_gmt":"2009-09-14T13:30:15","slug":"video-cameras-in-physics-class","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/fyi\/2009\/09\/14\/video-cameras-in-physics-class\/","title":{"rendered":"Video Cameras in Physics Class?"},"content":{"rendered":"
Jim Amidon<\/em> — Twenty-five years ago, I took a physics class at Wabash College from Professor Vern Easterling. Vern was an excellent teacher — is an excellent teacher — but I way underperformed in that class. I tried to get my head around the numbers and symbols and forces I could not see. But I just didn’t get it; the physics didn’t sink in. My heart wasn’t in it.<\/div>\n
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When it was all over, I think Professor Easterling took pity on me and gave me something like a C+ in the course. I was ashamed.<\/div>\n
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I wish I could do it all over again this fall. I really wish I could break out my flip-flops and baseball cap, and get up early for physics class. And I’m not kidding.<\/div>\n
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Imagine a physics class without a three-inch thick textbook. Seriously, try to imagine a college-level physics course that includes no<\/i><\/b> textbook.<\/div>\n
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It’s happening at Wabash right now. About 40 guys are taking an entry-level physics course for non-majors and they didn’t have to buy a textbook.<\/div>\n
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What’s next, hot dogs without buns?<\/div>\n
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\"\"The course is the brainchild of Assistant Professor Martin Madsen, who with guidance from his department chair, Dennis Krause, has designed a physics class modeled after the hit television show Mythbusters.<\/div>\n
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After spending three years on campus, Madsen started thinking about the Wabash environment and the ways Wabash guys learn. He knew that for non-majors, physics could be a challenge or, dare I say, boring. He set out to design an exciting course that would include freshmen through seniors applying their best critical thinking skills to solve problems using a Mythbusters format.<\/div>\n
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“Some of the stuff they do on Mythbusters is real science, and it’s engaging, it’s fun, and it’s exciting,” Madsen says. “What if we were to do science like they do science, where we present to the students a big picture myth and just let them loose?”<\/div>\n
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As he talked to me about the class last year, he hooked me right away when he said the students wouldn’t be buying textbooks. Instead, he told me, they’d be purchasing inexpensive video cameras — the kind you see in stores for around $100 (which, by the way, is about the cost of a college physics book these days).<\/div>\n
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“We want a visual communication of the science,” the professor says. “The students have to have a good grasp of what’s happening in order to turn around and teach it to others. The video cameras become the tools for taking data in the labs and then communicating that data back out.”<\/div>\n
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It’s a fascinating concept and I’m eager to watch the series unfold this fall. Yes, the “series” will be available on the Wabash website through the College’s YouTube channel.<\/div>\n
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Here’s how it works:<\/div>\n
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Professor Madsen divides the students into groups of four per team. He then throws a problem or myth at the teams, and off they go to do research into the physics, math, and common sense that will help them conduct experiments to “test” the myths and solve the problems. Their textbook is the Internet; their lab notebooks are video cameras; their homework assignments are well-edited videos that show how each team attempted to test the myth.<\/div>\n
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The myths the students must tackle involve force, gravity, mass, math, and all things physics. The experiments also look like a lot of fun.<\/div>\n
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“The 19th century model of someone lecturing to a room full of students just doesn’t fit the 21st<\/sup> century, it doesn’t fit the technology, it doesn’t fit the information age, it doesn’t fit the students now or our culture,” said Madsen.<\/div>\n
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I watched a short video clip<\/a> from a “lab” session last week. Two students dressed in football helmets and shoulder pads are riding on carts with boxes and pop bottles attached, and barreling head-on into one another.<\/div>\n
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Translation: Two large students (mass) moving at a specified speed (velocity) striking each other (force) as the cameras from various angles (including helmet-cam) captured the entire event.<\/div>\n
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(Perhaps my male readers will recall their childhood days of taking painstakingly constructed plastic model cars and crashing them together just to see the resulting collision. Bam!)<\/div>\n
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After the first week, Professor Madsen had students coming in with big smiles saying how much they had thought about the problem all week and how excited they were to get started in lab.<\/div>\n
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Madsen acknowledges the support he’s had in developing the course, and knows he wouldn’t have the opportunity at any other school.<\/div>\n
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“Being Wabash College where the attitude of the administration and the department is “let’s try it, let’s see what happens. It just makes this kind of class possible.”<\/div>\n
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Note: The Physics 105 course will be documented on the Wabash YouTube channel<\/a> and available at <\/i>www.wabash.edu<\/i><\/a>. The students have done introductory videos to date, and will soon begin posting videos of their experiments. Check back often.<\/i><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Jim Amidon — Twenty-five years ago, I took a physics class at Wabash College from Professor Vern Easterling. Vern was an excellent teacher — is an excellent teacher — but I way underperformed in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":16,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-343","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"w_featured_image_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/fyi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/343","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/fyi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/fyi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/fyi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/16"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/fyi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=343"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/fyi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/343\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/fyi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=343"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/fyi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=343"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/fyi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=343"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}