Videos & Pics from some of my teaching activities

Here I am with Sarah Johnson performing "Fearless Feats of Physics" at the SFU Open House, Saturday May 31 2008. This show is all about demonstrating (and understanding!) the laws of physics, and many of the demonstrations were done by or with audience members. Topics on this day included energy (suicide pendulum!), light (CO2 laser beam of destruction, left image), electricity (van der Graaf generator), and fluids (Bernoulli toilet-paper roll, middle image; liquid nitrogen baseball, right image). We ended the show with a mentos eruption competition between two parent/child teams! The show was a blast to prepare and put on, thanks to Sarah (who also organized it) and to Jeff Rudd (with whom I have worked on so many open houses I've lost count!) and Michael Steger for their creative advice and technical support.

There I go, testing a Mentos Eruption demonstration for the spring 2007 offering of Physics 190, Introduction to Astronomy, at the SFU Surrey campus. Thanks to Marty Cluff for getting this to work under (mostly!) controlled conditions, and for taking this video. I am nuts about this demo, and now do it as often as I can, mostly recently at the 2008 SFU Open House, where Sarah Johnson and I staged an audience Parent/Child mentos eruption competition!

The video quality is not great, but here I am way back in 1999, when I taught Physics 100, a high-school refresher course, for the first time. I'm riding a kid's electric cart in the left and center images and stamping the floor to trace motion at constant velocity. The "safety" helmut flashed red and beeped loudly, proof that I have no shame! The video on the on the top-right is the Suicide Pendulum, while bottom-left is the Whirligig, which demonstrates circular accleration, and force.

More from Physics 100 in 1999, including moustache and Bugs Bunny shirt. Here I am reading a force scale for an object on an incline, compared to the object hanging vertically, as an illustration of the vector nature of force. Yes, that is a heck of a moustache. Egads! Thanks to Neil Alberding for these and the other pictures from my stint teaching Physics 100.

How to make a pinhole camera (Part I)! From Physics 100 in 1999. Left: Cut a square hole in one end of a box. Tape an aluminum foil cover over the hole. Middle: Poke a small pinhole in the middle of the aluminum foil. Right: Cut off the other end of the box and remove it entirely. Cut out a square in that end and cover it with wax paper. Click "Next" to continue the instruction sequence.

How to make a pinhole camera (Part II)! Left: Insert the cutout end with the wax paper on it back in the box so that the image can fall on the wax paper. Tape the top. Middle: Point the pinhole side toward a bright source. Look through the open end at the wax paper screen, and slide the screen back and forth to change the image size and brightness. Right: We used a bulb as a source. See how good the image is!