MechTube - applied mechanics outreach for children
Hello everyone,
Professor Suo suggested that I share this speculative idea!
In the future, we would like to reach out to children as early as their elementary school years to get them excited about topics drawn from Applied Mechanics. One approach to this goal takes inspiration from the successful "Le main a la pate", or "hands-in-dough", program in France ( http://www.lamap.fr/ ), but extends the idea of hands-on science to take advantage of the internet.
Initially, we would gather ideas from the members of our Applied Mechanics online community for inexpensive and spectacular hands-on explorations of mechanical principles that would be safe and fun for children to carry out in their first science-oriented classes. Then we would encourage elementary school teachers to visit our website, choose projects that seemed interesting, try them in real classrooms, and post accounts of their successes and difficulties for everyone in the Applied Mechanics community to see and discuss.
If the students and teachers enjoyed these projects, we would encourage teachers to help their students produce short videos of the crucial moments of their experiments, and these videos could be shared online and ranked by viewers around the world such that the best ones would rise to the top. (Sites such as http://youtube.com/ and http://videosift.com/ have recently pioneered this democratic video-distribution-and-ranking mechanism. In our application, great care would be taken to protect the privacy of the children.) Here is a very simple but exciting science video already on YouTube - be sure to watch the ending!
http://www.youtube.com/watch.php?v=CH6-2UizHfI
Ideally, the video-sharing system would become self-sustaining: teachers could invent new projects themselves, asking college professors for help, and they could follow the best examples set by other teachers in their own classrooms. The children would learn how exciting Applied Mechanics can be at an early age, they could proudly show their parents their best experiments in action on any computer at home, and they would be more likely to be engaged by science classes later in their education.
Zak
Professor Suo suggested that I share this speculative idea!
In the future, we would like to reach out to children as early as their elementary school years to get them excited about topics drawn from Applied Mechanics. One approach to this goal takes inspiration from the successful "Le main a la pate", or "hands-in-dough", program in France ( http://www.lamap.fr/ ), but extends the idea of hands-on science to take advantage of the internet.
Initially, we would gather ideas from the members of our Applied Mechanics online community for inexpensive and spectacular hands-on explorations of mechanical principles that would be safe and fun for children to carry out in their first science-oriented classes. Then we would encourage elementary school teachers to visit our website, choose projects that seemed interesting, try them in real classrooms, and post accounts of their successes and difficulties for everyone in the Applied Mechanics community to see and discuss.
If the students and teachers enjoyed these projects, we would encourage teachers to help their students produce short videos of the crucial moments of their experiments, and these videos could be shared online and ranked by viewers around the world such that the best ones would rise to the top. (Sites such as http://youtube.com/ and http://videosift.com/ have recently pioneered this democratic video-distribution-and-ranking mechanism. In our application, great care would be taken to protect the privacy of the children.) Here is a very simple but exciting science video already on YouTube - be sure to watch the ending!
http://www.youtube.com/watch.php?v=CH6-2UizHfI
Ideally, the video-sharing system would become self-sustaining: teachers could invent new projects themselves, asking college professors for help, and they could follow the best examples set by other teachers in their own classrooms. The children would learn how exciting Applied Mechanics can be at an early age, they could proudly show their parents their best experiments in action on any computer at home, and they would be more likely to be engaged by science classes later in their education.
Zak
posted by Zak Stone at
12:35 PM
2 Comments:
Excellent idea!
One possible solution is to set up a vlog, allowing teachers and students to post their videos. Then the video ranking can be automated through the recommendations from users of this vlog. I'm a little bit concerned if we just rely on websites like videosift.com to rank such educational videos for outreach.
As for video blogging, the available platforms, such as Youtube, are already powerful and easy to use. You can easily embed Youtube videos in your blogs. I recently started to post videos at www.macroelectronics.org. See here and here for two examples.
By
Teng Li, at 7/20/2006 8:08 PM
Related entries in AMN:
Paul Steif on broadening the reach of mechanics
Shriram Ramanathan on Internet as a platform for public outreach
By
Zhigang Suo, at 7/21/2006 5:54 AM
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