Learning Glass

One of the things that the physics faculty are doing at my new job that I think is cool, is creating short homegrown physics instructional videos, in which all different faculty record themselves explaining some little piece of a concept. This is done with a technology called Learning Glass, in which the presenter lectures in front of a big glass window as if it was a whiteboard, and it gets flipped around in post-production so it doesn’t look inverted. (But it is inverted - see if you can tell.) The result is that students get to see us explaining things in our own styles, and they get to see all of us, instead of only their lecturer. I think it’s great.

Preparing to do my part was terrifying to me. I got to pick my topics at least, so I picked ones I felt good about (e.g., had developed instructional materials for in one of my past lives). But I don’t normally deliver lectures about physics topics at a board, even little short five-minute ones. It took me forever to get up the nerve to do it, and forever to prepare for it, and still I was nervous as heck.

That said, the results are fine! Not perfect by any means… for example, in one of them I was so nervous that my mind was a total blank and basically all I could do was read my notes, so you see me looking down a lot. But that’s okay. We don’t have to be perfect.

Focal point for mirrors and lenses

Image in a flat mirror

Pressure vs. depth