an inquiry-based course using physics in cartoons and movies

8/12/2019 An Inquiry-based Course Using Physics in Cartoons and Movies

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An Inquiry-based Course

Using Physics? inCartoons and MoviesMichael Rogers, Ithaca College, Ithaca, NY

B ooks, cartoons, movies, and video gamesprovide engaging opportunities to get bothscience and nonscience students excitedabout physics. An easy way to use these media in onesclassroom is to have students view clips and identifyunusual events, odd physics, or list things that violateour understanding of the physics that governs ouruniverse.1,2 These activities provide a lesson or two ofmaterial, but how does one create an entire course onexamining the physics in books, cartoons, movies, andvideo games? Other approaches attempt to reconcileevents in various media with our understanding ofphysics3-8 or use cartoons themselves to help explainphysics topics.9

The core premise of my School of Humanities &Sciences Honors Seminar is that the physics we see inthese media are real. We see the events occur, so theymust be real. Instead of being skeptics when watchingthese unusual and sometimes usual events occur, stu-dents form multiple working hypotheses that mightexplain the events they witness.10 Taking a very New-

tonian view of the worlds we are studying, studentsextract position-versus-time data using VideoPointsoftware (other software such as Verniers Logger Procan also be used but currently does not have all ofthe features of VideoPoint). Line fitting to these dataresults in an equation of motion informs the studentsabout the acceleration (which is frequently zero),the speed, and the initial conditions. These data andline fits are used to test students multiple workinghypotheses. In the grand tradition of experimental sci-ence the students often find themselves forming new

hypotheses and questions. Students report their resultsin written reports and oral presentations.

Structure of The CourseThe course is offered Tuesday / Thursday for an

hour and 15 minutes. Most class sessions begin witha 10-minute lecture covering kinematics, forces, en-ergy, gravity, bright line emission spectra, quantummechanics, special relativity, general relativity, and cur-rent work on unifying theories. The 10-minute lectureis followed by a 5-minute discussion of experimentaltechniques and an outline of the objectives for the classperiod. Students join their self-formed groups to selectclips to study, collect data, analyze data, and makeconclusions. Approximately every two weeks the classconcludes with a discussion of the physics studied, andanalysis is conducted with an emphasis on how scien-tists have developed an understanding of the physics inour world.

During the first few weeks of the semester studentsanalyze clips that I selected from the Road Runner &

Wiley E. Coyote cartoons and the Matrix movies.These experiments help the students learn how touse VideoPoint, form hypotheses, do line fits, makeconclusions, and submit a mini-project report.

Students followed these experiments by select-ing their own mini-topics to study. Students selectedtopics such as: the flying motion of characters in themovie Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, a free fallfrom the top of a tall building by the character Peterin the animated show the Family Guy , the fall of theBalrog and Gandalf from the Lord of the Rings mov-

38 DOI: 10.1119/1.2409508 THE PHYSICS TEACHER Vol. 45, January 2007


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THE PHYSICS TEACHER Vol. 45, January 2007 39

ies, and the unbelievable martial arts ability of Jet Li in Romeo Must Die. Students presented their results inmini-reports and oral presentations. The course con-cludes with students working on an advanced project

where they examine different events across multiplescenes or movies. An example of an advanced project isone groups work on examining flying motion in fourdifferent Peter Pan movies. Advanced projects requiremore rigorous testing of working hypotheses com-pared to the mini-topics. This work results in a formalreport and a final oral presentation where each studenthas a defined role in their group analysis by each stu-dent selecting a particular effect, scene, or movie tostudy in support of their groups overall goals.

Examples of Student WorkStudents reviewed several movies, cartoons, and

video games to identify physics topics to study. Theirselections mainly focused on finding usable scenes intheir desired media. Their introductory investigationsdirected by my selection of clips and our classroom

discussions helped students identify clips with the po-tential for successful analysis. My course differs fromthe usual experiment in that we cannot control thesetting of our experiment. If we could exert controlmy students would have the camera be stationary, notpan and not zoom. The view would be wide enoughto include all of the motion of the characters beingstudied and incorporate a scale into the frame. Rarelydoes this ideal situation appear in cartoons and mov-ies (one creative team chose to analyze gravity in thevideo game Halo I and Halo II, where they could

control many aspects of the scene). Once the studentsselected usable scenes they used a variety of methods toextract clips from videotape, DVD, and video games.These clips were shortened using VideoPoint Captureor QuickTime Pro to only include the region of inter-est, reducing the file size and making analysis in Vid-eoPoint smoother.

Reduced clips were imported into VideoPoint, where students set the scale using features in the scene.Students commonly used the height of a characterand obtained the actual height of the actor from aninternet movie database (www.imdb.com). With thescale established, students selected an origin and begantracking one or more points frame by frame. Video-Point records these data in tabular form and presentsoptions for graphing the data in various forms. Anunexpected outcome of my course was student use ofgraphs to find interesting changes in the data, whichled to looking at events in the clip. VideoPoint allowsstudents to move the cursor along the data points,

which triggers the video clip to track along the connect

frames. This sequence of analysis was unexpected dueto my previous experience of students looking at clips(or events) first and then going to the data. Instead,students used their data to guide their investigations.

VideoPoint helps students deal with camera pans,an origin that leaves the scene, and camera zooms.Using VideoPoint or MS Excel, students conduct linefits to the position-versus-time data. These fits resultin a kinematics equation of motion. Figures 1 and 2show student data extracted from the clip they choseto study and the position-versus-time graph with a

Peters Entire Fall

Time (s)

30

25

20

15

10

5

0

0-5

1 2 3 4 5

D i s t a n c e

( m )

Peter s Fall - Off the Roof

y = -9.6626 m/s * t + 30.887 m

R2 = 0.9462

Time (s)

D i s t a n c e

( m )

0.4 0.45 0.5 0.55 0.6 0.65

27.5

27

26

26.5

25

24.5

25.5

Fig.1. Shows Peters fall from beginning ( t = 0 s) to end( t = 4.2 s).

Fig. 2. Shows Peters initial fall from the roof right afterhe jumps. The data show a linear correlation with no net

acceleration.


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40 THE PHYSICS TEACHER Vol. 45, January 2007

line fit for a portion of the fall. The students in thisgroup chose to study a very challenging scene from theanimated TV show The Family Guy. The characterPeter is standing on the top of a building in the begin-

ning of the scene. Peter jumps with the camera situ-ated halfway up the building and pointing up at thesky, and Peter falls toward the camera. After Peter fillsthe scene, the camera angle switches to pointing down,and Peter can be seen falling away from the camera.The final scene has the camera positioned level withthe ground showing Peter falling vertically the last fewmeters. Each of these distinct aspects of the scene areidentifiable in Fig.1.

Suggestions for Success

The biggest challenge to this course is extracting us-able clips from a variety of media. The easiest methodis to use a videotape player, VideoPoint Capture soft-

ware, and a USB to RCA adapter (I used one fromBelkin). These tools can also be used to extract scenesfrom video games by plugging the game controllerinto the VCR line-in port. There are also various waysto extract clips from DVDs and I found these methodsto be time consuming. I recommend that appropriatetime be built into such a course as mine to allow forextraction of the desired media.

To satisfy copyright laws I purchase videotapes orDVDs equal to the number of clips used in my class.Students access these clips through a campus server,limiting them to use of the clips in my class. BecauseI have paid for a full version of the movie or cartoonfor each clip in use, there are no copyright issues.This procedure complies with the copyright policiesof Ithaca College, which may be different from otherinstitutions.

During my first offering of this course, I had the

students purchase a conceptually oriented physicstextbook. This turned out to be not necessary. The 10-minute lectures at the start of each class are sufficientto teach the students the needed physics.

VideoPoint has some useful tools for plotting ve-locity versus time, acceleration versus time, potentialenergy, and kinetic energy. All of these tools are notuseful for this type of course, because they rely on ourunderstanding of physics. Cartoons, movies, and videogames often have different equations of motion. A linefit to the position-versus-time data produces one of the

kinematics equations that help students identify thephysics of the world they are studying. Thisin myopinionis the strength of my class. Students haveto create the physics to describe the worlds they are

studying and in doing so develop an understanding ofhow our physics community has come to understandthe physics of our world. This is inquiry at its best!

A challenge of my course that I am still workingon resolving is how to assess each student individu-ally compared to assessment of group work. I plan ontrying new methods during the next offering of thecourse, and I welcome suggestions from readers.

ConclusionsEvaluating student reports, presentations, and in-

dividual discussions with students identified studentprogression from skeptics trying to identify tricks film-makers used to create the events students were seeing tostudents forming creative, testable hypothesis and con-ducting such tests. Without specific instruction on mypart but clearly relying on a previous knowledge base,students ended the course talking about density, termi-nal velocity, what happens if the mass of the Earth is ze-ro, and what scene is a good scene to extract data from.Students responded especially well to my discussionsof Einsteins miraculous year. Time dilation, lengthcontraction, and the equivalence principal engaged andexcited the students. Many students seemed frustratedthat they agreed with every step of my arguments whileexplaining these topics but did not want to believe thatthese effects occur. Sharing with students the complexnature of science, the creative nature of science, thecontroversial nature of science, and how ideas surviverigorous testing by scientists inspired my students to bemore creative and rigorous.

This course engaged science and nonscience majors

in pursuing scientific endeavors. It is not clear to meif this type of course can be as successful as a regulargeneral education course instead of an honors course.Honors students are definitely a different populationthan students in a general education course. Future

work will look at how this successful honors course canbe morphed into a successful general education course.

A definite challenge posed by moving this course froma specialty course to a general course is dealing withhaving more than 20 students. The time required toextract usable cartoon and movie clips under my cur-


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an inquiry-based course using physics in cartoons and movies

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