Early this year, our team will have a paper published in The Physics Teacher – it has already been accepted. It will be the 19th version. We ended up taking this essay I wrote below and turned it into a peer-review physics education paper. Honestly the final paper doesn’t look anything like the original essay! But the original essay is so much fun, I thought I would share it with y’all.

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(Essay) Empowering Journey Making an Interactive Video Vignette v0.0

It’s funny what you remember years after a difficult project is over.  Egla Ochoa-Madrid – one of my undergraduate students – and I were at the bottom of one of those iconic San Francisco hills that almost go straight up.  For some unknown reason, we were jokingly yelling some smack talk to one another about who would win a race up to the hill.  And then BAM!  We were racing, in full-sprint, up the hill.  We were on our way, with our teammate Lani Chau, to dinner in China Town at a conference.  We were at the conference to present our poster on lessons learned making an Interactive Video Vignette.

Interactive Video Vignettes (IVV) are a unique and adaptive approach to presenting information to students [1-2].  Whether we like it or not, students use videos online to study for exams.  These videos tend to encourage passive learning.  IVVs are exciting because they allow the designer to embed multiple choice questions and trap doors to encourage a more interactive learning environment.  We decided that we would try it out.  Our vignette can be found online at https://cosmicpathways.org/custom-made-vignettes/. 

Just like that race up the hill, Lani, Egla and I had no idea what we were getting ourselves into. I had previous swing dance experience and so I wanted include the knickerbocker as an application of Torque. The knickerbocker has the “lead” rotate the “follower” over their extended arm. Lani had previous experience in art and Egla had previous experience in performance so they were both excited to create an Torque IVV that was unique and that could excite more students to do physics by relating it to the arts.  Egla and Lani had never done any swing dancing at all so we needed to learn and train as well as recruit male students to be swing dancers. We were starting a film process and IVV project from scratch so we have a lot catch up on. At the time, there were only five or so IVVs available publicly so there was little to go by. The students had this project and their own coursework.

Ultimately, it was an empowering experience for the entire team.  Giving students a project like this in their sophomore year gave the students an opportunity to step up to the plate but in a way that didn’t seem so daunting.  It also taught me to let go and watch the students deliver something amazing on their own.

I was amazed at how well the project came together for the first time doing a project like this.  This project was a success, consider typical student feedback:

To get the max torque it is best to apply it at a 90-degree angle at the furthest distance possible. Torque does not exist when a force is applied at 180 degrees. Video was good but the acting was cheesy but this is due to your day to day school acting.

and

This project actually made learning a lot easier! I learned that there physics has a lot to do with dance moves. I also learned that the formula for torque can be simplified as rF sin theta and that at 90 degrees the torque is max

Typically, when I think about an undergraduate project, I think of something that starts at the end of the sophomore year or beginning of the junior year and continues throughout the remaining of the student’s college career – usually with the same adviser.  Both Egla and Lani started with this project when they were young underclassmen (sophomores).  But both would end up working on other senior research projects before graduation on other teams.  Lani, in particular, ended up doing a lengthy research project in chemistry, where she developed a passion for material science.  Throughout all of this, I remained an integral part of their educational paths as a mentor, academic adviser, and instructor.  At the time, I felt like I was doing something terribly wrong.  Here were two woman in physics and I was driving them out of my research group in their junior and senior years.  Why were they leaving?  But upon reflecting on our interactions over the years, the early education teaching project, empowered Egla and Lani to pursue their interests with confidence.  Having students make exciting IVVs is an excellent way to reinforce first year physics, to get the students involved in the physics community, develop mentorship opportunities with faculty members, and to provide students the full research life cycle – something that rarely happens in undergraduate research.  

As an undergraduate physics mentor it was a learning experience.  I had to learn how to let go and let the students do the project.  I was in a difficult part of my career.  We spent a lot of time story boarding, scripting, and getting the physics right.  I was in my fourth year as a professor and still had a ways to go before submitting documentation for tenure.  My chair and I were in perpetual disagreement and I was terrified to mess up.  My chair, at the time, loved optics and I couldn’t imagine what he was thinking as I was teaching students swing dancing and making physics IVVs. 

People who know me well know I often take things too far and stress out easily.  I had used money from a small grant I won on something loosely related to pay for three students, Egla, Lani, and James St. John (a volunteer) to learn how to swing dance, so they could make the video.  All the while this was going on, my wife broke her foot doing the same airstep the students were learning.  I was in FULL FREAK OUT MODE!  I was considering all the ways my students could hurt themselves as they fly in the air – and I would have to explain to the dean how I thought it would be a good idea to have students do this project. 

I was panicking.  How do you support your students, keep students safe, and do it all with little or no budget?  I think the students sensed this and while I was away at summer vacation they just made the videos and got a draft of the Vignette working.  It was awesome.  And a little scary when I heard the stories afterward of how the flips didn’t always go right.  Another weird part of the project was that the students recruited a film graduate student, CJ Russo, to help film and edit the video.  I have never meet him.  It was all arranged and negotiated by the students.

This project was very impactful for me.  I let go and allowed my students to make something great on their own.  Rather than working with them –  which is what I usually did, I was allowing them to generate the solution, with feedback from me, on their own.  Since then I have calmed down about this and give students considerably more freedom working on projects.  Learning experiences like this were instrumental.

At the top of the hill in San Francisco, Egla and I were both out of breathe.  We had made it.  Our team had tried something overwhelming, we succeeded, and now ready to take on the world.

We would like to acknowledge the efforts of an excellent team including James St. John (Film & Crew), Long Island Swing Syndicate (Training), Sean Bentley and Patricia Panatier (Script Review), CJ Russo (Film & Editing), Colleen Wright (Dance & Script Review), and The Adelphi University Performing Arts Center (Recording Sight). 

[1] R. Teese, T. Reichlmayr, P. Laws, P. Cooney, D. Jackson, M. Willis, and K. Koenig. Interactive Video Vignettes.  http://www.compadre.org/IVV. Accessed on January 22, 2020.

[2] P. Laws, W. Willis, D. P. Jackson, K. Koenig, and R. Teese.  The Physics Teacher 53, 114 (2015).