Visual Quantumphysics

About

Motivation for this project

A course like Quantumphysics can be highly abstract, especially for first-year students. To help them familiarize themselves with the world of the quantum a website was created on which additional learning material was placed. This material consists of online videos, interactive applets and also some self-made videos explaining difficult exercices. This is in itself not something new, as teachers have been placing links to external websites on Blackboard for many years. Most of the times, however, it is somewhat of a mess and, more importantly, people not following the course do not have access to it. So, the main goal of this Grassroots project was to start an encyclopedia containing categorized and contextualized links to existing  material and add material where necessary. 

Results

To find the website, please follow this link: VQ

The website was filled with links during the course, adhering to the structure of the lectures. Finding relevant material became increasingly difficult as the subject matter did so too, increasing the need for self-made material. The video-tutorials were made using screencapture and editing software. Some of them also contain other videos from the internet (Youtube) to, for example, explain a particular phenomenon.  Making things yourself, however, is time-consuming and further strengthens the need for an open encyclopedia so that material can be shared between students and teachers, perhaps even across universities and schools. Student reactions were positive, especially regarding the self-made video-tutorials. I believe that students would like to see more online activity, as the internet can be used to combine, store and share different sources of knowledge and is great addition to traditional lectures and tutorial-sessions.

Outlook

Online environments like Starfish and Tentamenlade are great tools for teachers, but a similar environment is missing for students. If teachers are sharing links to their students anyways, why not make this available to everyone? Moreover, this could be the ideal spot to also share self-made things like videos and Mathematica notebooks and thereby increase your audience. 

Project leaders: Huub Rutjes (master student physics, werkcollegedocent Quantumfysica 1)

Project duration: April '14 - May '14

Funding: 1000,-

Website: http://qf1.barbafilms.nl

Original author: Huub Rutjes (Student)

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