[Michael Peshkin] teaches mechanical engineering at Northwestern University. He likes to use diagrams to illustrate his point, but he also likes to face his students when doing so. His solution was to develop this clear whiteboard which ends up unlocking a lot more than just some hand-drawn schematics.
It’s a bit hard to see what he’s written on the board in the image above but squint and see if you can figure out what’s wrong with this style of teaching? Everything he’s writing is backwards. That’s not actually a problem in this case as [Michael] uses flip teaching. He records and posts all of his lectures online. Classroom time is then used for question and answer on the lecture subjects. In order to get the text to read the correct way he just bounces the camera off of a mirror.
The board itself is a huge sheet of tempered glass attached to the metal frame using bolts through holes in the pane. This leave the edges free. He added extruded rail to the top and bottom to embed strips of LEDs. They light the inside of the glass, and excite the fluorescent dry erase marker ink making it much more visible. [Michael] didn’t stop with the board, he also rigged up a lighting system that gives him a lot of options, and uses a monitor for dealing with digital overlays. He can put up a diagram on the computer, watching the monitor to see where his marker is making annotations. All this happens in real-time which means no post production! See a demo of these features after the break.
This could all be done without the glass at all, but that would make it quite a bit more difficult for the person doing the writing.
[Thanks Kevin]
So, he likes to face his audience in a video? Rite. That’s important, I guess.
You appear to be interacting more with the audience when you’re facing them.
It’s the reason sitcom families all sit on one side of the dinner table.
If you are going to make a stupid, snide remark at least spell properly.
p r o p e r l …. y
No, just properly.
Nope. You’re the stupid one.
I’d rather see his face when he talks than stare at his arse-end blocking whatever part of the whiteboard he’s in front of. this is fantastic.
I agree. And so do most people who have ever had to try and take notes off the black or white board while the instructor is talking about the subject at hand and standing in the way.
Absolutely! One of my classmates actually complained that our professors back was to us.
it’s not that important. but if you want to make it look like a presentation, and it’s not that hard to set up, then why not? I can walk from NY to California, but there is a plane, so i guess I’ll take the plane. Why not?
That’s pretty awesome
“Flip Teaching” taken Very literally!
Writing backwards is not so easy… Nice concept.
Video is flipped in post-processing… unsure if trolling.
Oh! Never mind–camera faces a mirror.
Flipping it is probably easier, and what I would’ve done.
You have to cut this guy a little slack. He is, after all, a mechanical engineer. On the bright side, the mirror is less computationally intensive than flipping the image digitally. So, if the system is used for a sufficient amount of time, the energy savings will pay for the mirror and then some. Or maybe there were space and optical system constraints that made the extra optical path length desirable.
Very cool he gives away how to replicate it instead of keeping it secret and making everyone think he has the natural ability to write in reverse.
He wouldn’t be fooling anyone. The image is obviously flipped, because the buttons on his shirt appear to be on the wrong side.
He should buy some women’s shirts.
Would you people just read the fucking article? It explains all of this in a few small paragraphs…
But that takes time and effort. It’s much more efficient to complain about topics one knows nothing about. The fact that it makes one appear to be illiterate is irrelevant.
Ah yes, the golden ages.
that is one expensive build.
I would love to see some of his lecture videos.
I think one must be the university’s student to get access.:(
Nevermind, I’m an addict now: http://peshkin.mech.northwestern.edu/233/004_TranslatingCircuitDiagrams.html
This is where I’d go if I could go back to school and retake the electronics track that I missed out on the first time ’round. When I tried to get into the electronics track we had a USN theoretical physicist teaching E 101 and E 102. He was a genius, but he might as well have been speaking a different language to us noobs. Oh but for a chance to do it all over again with this prof at Northwestern. I hope other schools will take notice of this method and start implementing it… pure amazingness. Wow, just wow!
Method and ability to communicate are two different things. Ultimately it would be nice to get a balanced mixture between good method and good skills. I had a lecturer at uni who would just simply fill up every whiteboard with equations going through the class, it was impossible to follow. But the way he spoke and explained things made him one of the best lecturer’s I’ve had.
Here’s your chance: http://peshkin.mech.northwestern.edu/233/
I blame dan if i get reported.
Would likely be a cheaper viable alternative to use acrylic glass in place of the tempered glass. Just have to make sure you buff the surface really well to get that crystal clear appearance.
One notes he makes is that the sapphire glass is more resistant to scratching as markers and erasers are run over the surface over time,
I’d be concerned about the acrylic staining over time much like what happens to homemade whiteboards made from Tileboard/melamine. While it’s more of an aesthetic thing with the whiteboard, here it would really effect the quality of the production due to the reliance on the clarity of the glass.
This is totally rad. Its like a high budget instructional video but all practical effects done in realtime. I love this.
What a strange op amp circuit he’s drawn. Why he needs that transistor input, or puts the feedback on the negative side I’ve really no idea.
so… your input provides negative feedback to the discussion involving an input and negative feedback. Folks, pcf11 is (for all intents and purposes) an op amp.
that is all.
That’s not a regular transistor. It has no base, so it’s probably a phototransistor, and it’s not referenced to ground but some other voltage.
And it’s a non-inverting amplifier. It has a higher input impendance.
This is too cool. As a prof in the mechanical engineering dept., who also teaches electronics, I now need this.
I watched some of the lectures that Laszlo found, and it seems that the students all got an electronics kit to take home. The heart of the kit is an nscope (http://nscope.org/). Where, for the love of caffeine, can I get one of those units?
Agree. Where do I order one ? Shut up and take my money :D
likewise. take my money NOW.
Why can’t I buy one yet?!
I will buy 2.
Site says the it was developed by the university so my best bet would be to enroll….or try e Bay and hope for the best… :(
There is a URL on the image of the pcb, but it is a secure site: https//hades.mech.northwestern.edu/index.tmp/nscope
Looks like a previous version is documented here:
http://hades.mech.northwestern.edu/index.php/NUScope_2011
Likewise, every tinkerer should own one. Take my money too!:)
Also those lectures are drugs, just can’t stop watching them.
Especially knowing the university will sooner or later shut the public off.
Still I have almost half of the lectures to watch, I think I will be up for all the night:)
Later guys. Back to “learning”!
It does look pretty nifty, but note that it’s only 400kHz. That’s very slow for most purposes. Of course, when learning AC circuit theory, there’s no need to make things go very fast, and by keeping things slow, you avoid a lot of confusing issues around parasitics, you don’t need expensive scope probes, and you can build your circuits on those breadboards. Looks like a fantastic tool for its purpose, and a fun thing to play with, but something that would be easily outgrown. I bet it could be a profitable commercial product, but who knows what legal issues might make it difficult for the public university to sell the design to non-students.
It looks like, from browsing the sites involved, that the nScope is possibly one of the projects that the students are required to complete. If they are all required to complete this circuit, then they all have the same standardized hardware to use with the course.
I was impressed with the concept, but then when I saw the actual video… WOW!
I’m curious about the drilling though. I was under the impression that tempered glass couldn’t be drilled.
You order the glass Pre-drilled – that’s how all tempered glass with holes are made.
good to know, but I still wonder how that’s accomplished. Surely they don’t cast them in…
never mind, being dumb.
Yep, they drill then temper. :)
I think it involves unicorns or narwahls. it’s all done in a special factory with no windows. none of us are quite sure how it happens.
hah!
It is probably best to drill the holes before tempering. However, I have drilled holes in tempered glass without breaking it.
ah, now I get it. When you drilled it, did you use a diamond hole saw, or something else?
To drill this non-tempered glass (see comment below about how I was wrong about its being tempered), I used a diamond bit from Harbor Freight in a Dremel tool while spraying water on the glass for cooling.
Really? how?
Tempering glass increases the surface tension, as soon as you breach the surface it shatters like a soap bubble (or a prince rupert’s drop).
I was mistaken; the glass in question wasn’t tempered. The glass was from a window pane. I knew it wasn’t tempered at the time I was drilling it several years ago, but since then I got mixed up about the federal law in the U.S. requiring tempered glass in doors. I was thinking it applied to windows too, but it doesn’t.
Windows immediately adjacent to doors in buildings with public access (such as restaurants) must be tempered glass.
insert comment about glorified weatherman here……
all joking aside it is a nice bit of work he did.
Neat, he needs to add augmented reality to replace his powerpoints, but nice.
This is completely brain dead.
Cool professors FTW!
one of my favorite profs – he runs the robotics competition :)
I don’t know why lecturers insist on repeatedly writing things out instead of honing a presentation and talking through it. Just makes it hard to read, no consistent notes to follow, points missed, etc.
Because when you hone one presentation, you get slack and you don’t update it regularly, so your lecture becomes more and more useless with time… See it as the inverse of Moore’s law. I do agree that presentations is often more useful, but not all lecturers have time to make new presentations each time. Also, some people feel using a presentation is more like preaching or just repeating, while when they write, they feel one with the work so they give you their insight. If they do however write on the board from a book or scrap paper, then they are just plain lazy.
The act or writing can be followed by the reader. It helps the learning process to watch the hand-drawn words.
Having him “speak” the words while writing triggers more modes in the human brain. Our mirror neurons trick us into feeling the writing process (touch), while reading the words (sight) and hearing the words (hear). By triggering several modes simultaneously, the viewer is more likely to understand the topic.
(When you explain things, some people will say “I see”, some will say “I hear you”, and some will say “that feels right”. This is a clue to the mental mode they work from, and you can tun your explanation to better trigger that mode.)
Just showing the text suddenly robs the viewer of some of those perceptive clues.
very few people understand how difficult it is to teach and flip the things you present so that they appear the way they should.
I’ve shown the same style but just using a TabletPC on SIGGRAPH 2011:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eM9d79ZqPow
Same setup, two years old: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jNOpru13C_c
Very cool. Hope something like this is standard. Think Iron Man work lab.
woohoo, $16,133 setup !
I am using a lightboard, as you call it, to teach online, but I would like to put a graph up on the clear plastic. Do you know of any product, and overlay or clear graph, that i could put up on the lightboard?