141/121 Video Project Description

Projects
1) Groups of 3-4 students. If you have more than 4 people, you can work together to do two videos.
2) Project of your choice, but you can look at the Video Projects Webpage to get an idea of what people have done in the past. It has to be more than just repeating a calculation. You must do an activity or analyze an activity. HOWEVER, maybe you have seen one of our required videos that you wish was done better? Maybe you can do it better! I got this idea from reading this article about student videos made for other students.
3) Produce video less than 5 minutes for class, and Email this link to your instructor. You may find that it is more than 5 minutes. But you can edit out pauses and you can also speed up parts, like when you are writing out equations. If the video is over 6 minutes, I won’t watch it. See this video or this other video for ideas in compressing time.
4) I’d like to receive a proposal for a video from each group by Thursday of week 8.
Grades: to receive an “A”, your project will do all of the following
1) Your group chooses a topic that related to mechanics. You can
– pick one topic we studied and go more in depth,
– build something and show how it works or conduct an experiment
– report on something that draws on what we’ve learned
… If you’re not sure, please ask me.
2) Your example will be factually correct, and relevant. As a counter example Falling out of an airplane was a video that was really well done, but didn’t have any relevant physics in it.
3) Your video audio and visuals will be of high enough quality to completely understand what you are conveying. For instance, the physics video on variable moment of inertia yo-yo was a great experiment, but I couldn’t present it to students because of the poor quality.
4) You post your link for the finished video to me by midnight, Saturday before the last week of classes…. If you can teach me something I wasn’t aware of before, I’ll be extra impressed!watch out! Students often make the mistake of using circular reasoning: using a formula to prove a formula. For example: You drop a block off a 10 m cliff, and make a video of it. You calculate what the speed of the bock should be when it hits the ground by conserving energy. Then you calculate the final kinetic energy and note that it’s the same as the initial potential energy… of course it is because you used the same energy to calculate the final speed… you have to measure the final speed using the video (or some other means). Then you have two independent measurements (speed and height) to measure the potential and kinetic energies and see how close they are together and see if it’s close enough to be within your expected uncertainties. Please let me know if you don’t understand this concept because it’s something that many projects have done incorrectly.
To get a “B”, your video will achieve 3 of the above 4 goals
To get a “C”, your video will achieve 2 of the above 4 goals
It’s often difficult to get good audio because the good whiteboards are in populated areas. Here is a great video (in my opinion) where they solved both the “time compression” problem as well as the audio problem by recording the audio separately from the video.