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From the Mind's Eye to 3D Animation: Teaching Electromagnetism with Learning Technology
John Belcher
Professor of Physics
Division of Astrophysics
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Cambridge, Massachusetts
jwb@space.mit.edu
I turned to animation technology - and substantially changed the way I teach - for a very good reason: At the end of my third year of teaching our 700-student freshman Electromagnetism class, ...I got very good student reviews and received a teaching award ... But I would still only have 60 percent attendance in lecture at the end of the course because they didn't need to come. The students knew they could learn what they needed from the book. They did well on the tests I gave them, but quite frankly I think it was rote learning.
I've taught electromagnetism at a variety of levels from graduate to upper-level physics major to freshman. ...people have trouble visualizing what you're talking about; it is very mathematical....a lot of this material is so complicated that you never really understand totally what's going on. So visual illustration really helps - even for a professional.
I became really enchanted with what you could do with animation... For a 700- student course, which is really hard to teach, if you find something that helps you get their attention and deliver information, you really pay attention to that tool.... A lot of the demonstrations that you see on the Website are used in experiments that I do in lecture. I do the demonstration and then I'll tell the students, "The things that you can't see I'm going to show you in this visualization." ...These are not cartoons....If electromagnetic fields were visible, this would be exactly what they look like...
If you have any questions about the animations, you can contact me at:
jwb@space.mit.edu
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