Sunday, June 6, 2010

My top ten list for Physics teaching

10. Wired magazine's "Top Ten Amazing Physics Videos". Students loved the Large Hadron Collider rap video from this link which I showed as the grand finale to my College Physics course.

9.  What do catcher's mitts, automobile airbags and Spiderman's webbing have in common? They all can be understood by doing rate of change of momentum calculations. Dr.Jim Kakalios, Physics Professor at University of Minnesota shows how! 

8.  School for Champions is a gentle introduction to high school Physics for students who have never encountered Physics at the secondary school level.

7.  Thank God for technology. Professor Walter Lewin of MIT has become an internet legend through his old school, superstar lecture style videos reaching millions of Physics students worldwide.

6.  Harvard Physics Professor Eric Mazur declares war on old school style Physics lectures . It is absolutely wicked fun to watch his "confessions".

5. Since my alma mater can not be far behind in streaming videos, master Physics educator Prof. V. Balakrishnan holds students in rapt attention on Classical Physics. I wish he had been my Physics teacher much much earlier in my career than the graduate course he taught me.

4. It is more reliable than Wikipedia and very accessible for student research on Physics. I often turn to Hyperphysics for a quick search myself.

3. There are Physics simulations on the internet and then there is PhET, University of Colorado at Boulder's pride and joy.

2. David J. Griffith's "Classical Electrodynamics", an engaging text which I used in my beginning years of graduate school still brings a lump in my throat when I read these lines "The implication is tantalizing. Perhaps light is an electromagnetic wave."

1.  I include "Feynman's Lectures" not just as a nod to popular sentiment and timeless appeal. Every day, when I boil water for tea first thing in the morning, I can not but replay in my mind his two paragraphs on molecular motions leading to evaporation.

You will notice that the top two items on the list are not visual elements. Good old solid pieces of writing. And they do not need hyperlinks.