How about an animation explaining Foucault’s pendulum?
Or just start with the basics, like inertia.
How about an animation explaining Foucault’s pendulum?
Or just start with the basics, like inertia.
Perhaps a 28-day countdown/calendar attached to the lunar cycle to show how far into the cycle each phase progresses.
While we’re nitpicking, would it be rude to point out that although the sun is represented in the animation (too close to the Earth but obviously I understand this is a constraint of the medium), the moon is clearly being illuminated by a light source at infinity (the terminator line remains horizontal WRT our viewpoint as it orbits, even though the angle to the (representation of) the sun varies widely).
Anyway, a few ideas:
-How tides work
-How an orbit is actually equivalent to falling
-How acceleration is equivalent to gravity (perhaps featuring a bow-legged person with bendy knees in a cross-section of an elevator)
Thanks, although it’s a bit beyond me. Fascinating stuff, but I’ll have to stick to just watching the animations.
You might want to talk to (or steal ideas from) the folks mentioned here.
I’d love to see you tackle the relationship between mass and weight - and how the two are not actually equivalent.
Going for the low-hanging fruit, since you seem to talking about seeing these videos used for educators, I’d love to see a video about the loss of the Mars Climate Orbiter probe, and the hazards of failing to include units with mathematical answers. As a definitive answer to all the whines I rememer about how including units in homework answers was stupid.
Believe it or not, I was a grown woman before I understood that visible light, heat, music, etc. were all different bandwidths of one spectrum. I would love to see something that made the relationship between them a little clearer.
And how about something that follows solar energy into plants, then into the human digestive tract and through the metabolic process? I think animated mitochondria would be very cool!
If by ‘music’ you mean radio transmissions, then yes, if you mean audible sounds, then no - sound waves are not the same kind of phenomenon as electromagnetic waves such as light, heat, radio etc.
I can have a go at scoring music - no guarantees on quality, but I can do something.
What license are you releasing this material under?
You may wish to consider a Creative Commons license.
Also, what tools do you use, and would you be prepared to open up your source files. The reason I say that is because it would be good to offer something that other people can use to produce language variants. Its the sort of thing that would look good on an OLPC system (One Laptop Per Child - a scheme to deliver low-cost computers throughout the third world).
Just a thought.
Oh, and on the lunar theme - an explanation of Lunar and Solar Eclipses.
Si
For an easy one, what about Bernoulli’s Principle and how it doesn’t really jive with flight?
Feel free to nitpick away… this was only meant to be a rough way of getting across only one point: Why the phases appear as they do from earth. Scales are way off (as well as orbiting positions and axes of the bodies) , and while the light source (the sun) as it appears in the video is very close, I set it to infinite, because as far as our naked eye can tell, it appears so in reality. Had I made the light cone come directly from the sun as seen, the inset of the moon would have appeared far more inaccurate. But really, this was a down and dirty way to illustrate one aspect of the moon phases, nothing more. My next attempts will be FAR more accurate (with all of your help) and dynamic.
It’s weird, because I just completed a science project on this very thing with my 8 year old daughter. As Mangetout already pointed out, sound waves are fundamentally different than radio waves. But in context, it looks as if you were aware of that.
Wonderful. I’m not too savvy at all these Open Source protocols and licenses and what have you, so I need people like you to help make those decisions. But I definitely have my homework cut out for me.
What I imagine is a wiki like community headed by me and and other like-minded individuals, that can create content themselves, and vet content being created by community members to make sure quality standards are being met (from a creative, visual, and scientifically accurate standpoint). I want everything to be freely available to those who want to use it in an educational environment or just plain want to watch or download at their own leisure, with little to no hoops to jump through. But I do understand this content needs protection to avoid anyone grabbing it and using it for their own commercial gain… the people involved need to hold the rights and permissions (and get credit where it is due).
ANY creative talent you’d like to offer would be MUCH appreciated. It would be a commitment, so please think about it! Eventually, I will get a site up and running, so it’ll be easier to organize all of this… but for now, I just wanted to hear some thoughts and ideas. A lot of this is over my head, but I know this is the place to come to help me stay afloat.
Everyone else… I’m keeping a list of all your ideas, so far each one has been logged and are all perfect examples of what I’ve been looking for. I would say to even feel free to elaborate on your ideas to get across examples of where the general public might confuse certain principles with myths or other commonly held misunderstandings. Like ouryL’s example of what creates the seasons… most people misunderstand, they think it’s the proximity to the sun in it’s eccentric orbit (in reality it have very little effect), when in fact it has to do with how the earth’s axis is pointed depending on it’s orbit position, the weather patterns, and ocean currents.
P.S. Least Original: I do know a little about Bernoulli’s Principle, and I am aware that there’s some misunderstanding involved as to how it really relates to lift in an aircraft… can you elaborate? Maybe this can be pointed out in the Airplane/Treadmill video
There are already lots of these out there.
For example, here are some great Flash Animations illustrating various concepts from Physics.
And here are some Java Applets that let you interact with various objects to learn basic mechanics.
Then there’s NASA’s Virtual Lab where you can play with your own virtual scanning electron microscope, and for earth sciences there’s NASA SVS and World Wind. All very cool stuff.
I’m sure there are plenty more such resources out there. Those are just the ones I had in my ‘favorites’.
Basically, the traditionally-taught view of Bernoulli’s principle goes like this:
A wing splits the air into two halves. The top half has further to go than the bottom half before meeting up again. Therefore, the pressure on the top of the wing drops.
The pressure differential creates lift. If you have a 3 PSI difference between the top and bottom of the wing, and the wing has 14,000 square inches of surface area, you get 42,000 lbs of lift.
This view is wrong. Classical diagrams showing wing lift typically show the air behind the wing returning to the same state it was before the wing went through it, which is incorrect (see the picture at the bottom of this page). Also incorrect is the notion that an air particle which goes over the top of the wing must somehow ‘meet up’ with the air particular travelling underneath the wing. That’s the rationale used to explain that the air on top speeds up and drops in pressure.
In fact, the real force that causes an airplane to fly is Newton’s 3rd law. A wing creates lift by accelerating a mass of air downwards behind it (the ‘downwash’). This creates an equal and opposite reaction which is ‘lift’.
Here’s a good page that explains it: How wings create lift.
The ‘wrong’ explanation is still widely taught, including in ground school for pilots.
This is the sort of stuff I’m looking for. While much of the general population (including myself) believe they have a grasp on science, there are tons of examples where they’re mistaken or have been misled. There are also many out there that are just plain ignorant of this stuff, and it is these I’d like to cater to. I realize there is tons of this kind of stuff out there, but as I said before, they’re rarely in one place, troublesome to incorporate into your own materials, and inconsistent content wise and visually. Maybe it’s futile? But I’d like to make a couple over the next month, and I’ll post them back here… maybe get some juices flowing