Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Adding Student Video Projects To Physics Courses, David Abbott, Andrew Roberts, Dan L. Macisaac, Kathleen Falconer, Florian Genz, Stefan Hoffmann, Andre Bresges, Jeremias Weber

Videos for Physics Teaching

Physics students have traditionally prepared many kinds of reports—laboratory, activity, project, and even book or article reports. Smartphones and YouTube videos are familiar cultural objects to current students, and our students use smartphone cameras to include photographs of apparatus, phenomena, hand-sketched figures, graphs, and mathematical equations in their physics reports. Here we present basic techniques for physics students to use smartphones and tablets to create short (< 5 min) end-of-semester video projects. Our students mainly use Apple Computer’s iPad1 tablets, but also other tablets and various smartphones. Finally we discuss appropriate instructor expectations and grading. Similar non-physics student video reporting efforts were reported using video cameras by Kearney,2 and Hechter and Guy.3