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Re: The Mechanical Universe



Margaret,

The videos are GREAT if you're heavily into calculus and calculus derivations,
and are interested in a historical perspective. The "dancing equations" with
computer animated figures illustrate the calculus well, particularly 3D &
vector calculus. When I used them, I mostly just played the animations and
I wish they'd make one videodisk of just the animations. When I taught at
Purdue I taught lectures that traditionally did a lot of calculus derivations
and these fit well in that format.

Really go for the videodisks if you can, as then you have all the benefits of
that format (fast, nonlinear retrieval amongst disks with high quality
stills and instant rewind). It's too hard to use 2 videotapes and find 2
exerpts each live before a crowd. The disks are about $1200 and the tapes are
about $700 from Annenberg/CPB (1-800-LEARNER). Lately another company has
made up a HS Adaptation and is selling what they call "Quads" of four 15-20
min short excerpts from the episodes for about $75 each quad (Intelcom,
818-796-7300). There are 7 "Quads" and I can't comment on their worth as
I just have sales literature from the company.

The historical story lines are very good, esp the Kepler series (reused in
Sagan's COSMOS), and the two programs on integration and differentiation
are really good for teaching intro calc entirely apart from their physics
content. Animated Simpson's rule summations, more dancing equations, colour
-coded derivatives and integrals get redder and bluer as they are repeatedly
processed. A long treatment of orbits and spacecraft navigation that would
lead well into a second year mechanics course. Trouble is, at PU we tended to
cram gravitation into 1 lecture, which represents about 3-5 episodes of TMU.
I am not so familiar with the post-mechanics episodes.

Oh yes, the historical segments are all costumed and in appropriate sets, your
students would be laughing at 1600's style haircuts & Brahe's gold nose.
If you show the whole pgms (30 min each) then you get snips of Goodstein's
CalTech lectures at the start/end. I recommend you skip this, (we can bore
them live as well as Goodstein does on tape). You will have students requesting
access to the videos/disks at the library if you excerpt snippets in class.
Goodstein and his students have restrained but dated clothing, and like
US hair styles in general, it looks like lots of male students are Marines
(this is how we spot American kids vacationing in Canada -- we look for 8
year olds with grunt haircuts :^). A little filthy foreigner humour there,
folks.

The TMU and Beyond TMU texts are well worth having about for historical
references, and the physics is good physics. It IS limited in scope, and
very calc-heavy with limited problem solving. Nice to have if you have $$
and a should-have if you teach calc-based physics. TMU doesn't resemble
any popular current commercial text, which makes it hard to fit into the
standard curricula. Standard curricula do much less historical material,
little meaningful examination of calculus, and treat astronomy/celestial
navigation only briefly. You will have long dry stretches where you cannot
use the TMU programs to supplement your standard course, with brief bursts
of frantically rich lectures (eg, gravitation, or waves) if you follow
current texts rigorously.

If you have more specific questions, maybe I can help off-list.

Dan M

Dan MacIsaac, Assistant Professor of Physics and Astronomy, Northern AZ Univ
danmac@nau.edu http://www.phy.nau.edu/~danmac/homepage.html

I've seen several references on the list to The Mechanical Universe,
and I've visited their www site. However we don't have easy access
to the videos or text to trial this series.

Could anyone who has used this material in their
university-level teaching of introductory physics give me an idea of
how useful they've found it, and what the teaching level is (i.e.
what standard physics text the level most resembles)? Also, how old
is it - i.e. is the video series "dated" at all? I've used some
relatively old astronomy videos, only to lose student concentration
while they laugh at the old hairstyles etc!

Thanks
Margaret Mazzolini


Dr. Margaret Mazzolini
School of Biophysical Sciences and Electrical Engineering
Swinburne University of Technology
P.O. Box 218,
Hawthorn VIC 3122 Australia
email: mmazzolini@swin.edu.au
phone: (61 3) 9214 8084 fax: (61 3) 9819 0856