12/13/2022 0 Comments Physics science experiments![]() You have to figure it out yourself.įor Feinberg, seeing undergrads across the world enjoy the hands-on experiments makes the countless hours toiling in his home office and scrambling to put together the kits worth it. I try to teach them what it’s really like to be a physicist - not to do canned experiments but to do experiments that are open-ended and don’t have instructions. This fall semester, Anton shouldered a huge amount of the burden and the sheer labor involved in assembling and mailing a thousand kits.” “For the spring semester, I mailed 11 kits and thought, wow, this is a lot of work. “You’re not going to find a vendor who would do this normally,” Feinberg says. Their cargo arrived just in time for them to quickly assemble, pack and send the goodie bags to students. Would the container ship sail into the Port of Long Beach in time to mail the kits before lab sessions started in late August? After several tense weeks of worry about shipping delays and dockworkers going on strike, the duo exhaled. With their order placed, Feinberg and Skorucak waited with fingers crossed. I wanted to give back a little bit, and I feel kinship with these students.” “USC definitely has a special place in my heart. “I got into this business really to spread the love of physics and science to younger people,” he says. But Skorucak jumped into action, calling in favors with his contacts. Cargo shipments usually take a month to arrive, but COVID-19 had scrambled the supply lines. vendors keep a lean stock of scientific products on hand, so Feinberg would have to buy them in bulk from overseas. Skorucak now owns the online science equipment company xUmp, and he knew that sourcing so many items at the last minute would be tricky.īoxes filled with science gadgets arrived at students’ homes this fall. In late May, Feinberg reached out to Anton Skorucak ’99, one of his graduate students 20 years ago. Their contents ranged from the specialized (oscilloscopes and voltmeters) to the low tech (plastic rulers, Slinky tubes and, yes, rubber balls). Nearly 100 of them traveled to places as far flung as South Korea, Brazil, India and Costa Rica. With a lot of logistical planning and the help of a former student who runs a science supply store, Feinberg ensured more than 1,000 briefcase-size kits arrived at the doorsteps of students and teaching assistants. “But you can show the basic principles of physics with some really simple equipment.” “We couldn’t do really fancy-dancy stuff,” he says. (Photo/Pam McKniff)īy the end, he had come up with dozens of hands-on experiments for students to do at home. Jack Feinberg uses a kit to build circuits for an online class in electricity and magnetism. Shipping glass and food across borders proved too cumbersome. ![]() He discarded setups that proved too tricky, boring, expensive or impractical - like one involving a glass pie plate and marshmallows that would reveal clues about the radiation inside microwaves. ![]() ![]() What the Professor Did Last Summer: Tinker in the Garageįeinberg planned to travel with his wife last summer, but the pandemic lockdown left him plenty of downtime to devise experiments students could do without a lab. He sent hands-on experiments straight to his students. So when COVID-19 kept hundreds of USC undergrads from the physics labs on campus where they’d normally tinker with electrical circuits and magnets, Feinberg had to take action. The USC professor of physics, astronomy and electrical engineering likens it to the difference between playing a racing video game and taking a Formula One car for a lap on the track: “There really is no comparison.” He knows the power of doing a hands-on experiment rather than watching a demonstration or video. You might not think of a toy ball as lab equipment, but it’s an incredibly effective device to teach students about gravity, the speed of sound and their brain’s reaction time.īreaking down physics into simple lessons using everyday objects has been Jack Feinberg’s passion for 40 years. Have you ever timed how long it takes a rubber ball to hit the ground after you drop it? If so, you did a physics experiment. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |