Sunday, September 29, 2013

In which I attempt to wrangle the Hewitt Drew It! screencasts

Paul Hewitt is on a screencasting rampage, and no topic in Conceptual Physics is safe!

He's been producing and releasing short video lessons for over a year, and he isn't finished yet. They're going up on YouTube, and I haven't been able to keep up with the proliferation.

By the way, he's currently working on one in which he hopes to show the cover of the original Conceptual Physics: The High School Physics Program textbook (Addison-Wesley, 1987), but doesn't have a copy on hand. Neither do I. If you do, please contact him at pghewitt@aol.com and let him know. I couldn't even find an image of the CP1 high school textbook cover using my image search Google-fu. Second edition? Third? Fourth? No problem. First? A bit of a problem.

Anyway, Paul Hewitt is loading YouTube up with these 5-10 minute physics lesson gems, but I was finding them difficult to incorporate in my curriculum. I'm not keen to show them during class, but I do want students to see them. And I want to be a bit more helpful than to say, "Watch that one Hewitt Drew It about Newton's Second Law."

What I needed was a convenient directory, like a table of contents, for the Hewitt screencasts. So I started to create one. I aligned it, to the best of my ability, to Conceptual Physics 11/e, but that's not a critical issue.

On one web page, I list all the topics covered in Conceptual Physics. Each topic listed is a link to a page that collects all the screencasts relating to that topic.

The work is very much "in progress". But I'm done with Part One: Mechanics. The topics include
Newton's First Law
Linear Motion
Newton's Second Law
Newton's Third Law
Momentum
Energy
Rotational Motion
Gravity
Projectile and Satellite Motion

This gets me through my entire first semester. I'm guessing it will do as much for you.

My next goals will be parts four, five, and six: sound, E&M, and light. I'm indicating which topics are "connected" by showing them in boldface type. Topics listed in regular (roman) type are, as yet, not yet finished.

Hewitt Drew-It! PHYSICS Screencast Directory

1 comment:

Unknown said...

Thank you so much for doing that. I'm working on incorporating them into my classes as well.