Mar 27 2010
how stuff works
I’m a big fan of howstuffworks.com but there are times you just need to get your hands dirty and find out for yourself. My S3 class spent the last physics lesson of the term taking apart a portable colour tv to see what was inside the box. Of course, they have a fair idea as they have studied the theory of how an image is produced in the screen but I wanted them to see the real thing. Luckily, a friend was getting rid of a broken tv set and I “rescued” it from the bin men.
We ran two video cameras during the “dissection”. One was a Flip Mino HD and the other was an aGent webcam I bought about two years ago to replace a broken firewire webcam. I’ve not used the aGent much this past year as my macbook has a built-in iSight camera but it is a nice piece of kit, with a variety of tripods and clips to position it for classroom filming. I’ve used the aGent for classroom filming before, the same class took a hoover apart but this was the first time I had made much use of the Flip Mino HD.
Three pupils were involved in the dissection while their classmates watched the footage relayed to my projector by the aGent camera. We had a good 30 minutes of unscrewing,wire cutting, removing and identifying various components. Now I have the difficult job, taking footage from the two cameras and producing a short film about the TV during the Easter holiday.
Update:
The video is finished. Watch it here.
Sinclair what do you make of the Physics lessons here?
http://www.khanacademy.org/
They are quite good and I have linked to some of them before on my other blog. Sometimes hard to get one that fits exactly with our NQs, so I might suggest that pupils focus on, say, the first 3 minutes of a video. Definitely worthwhile though.