Physics Interactive Video Tutor (PIVoT)
MIT’s Center for Advanced Educational Service (CAES), in collaboration
with the Physics Department, is producing a new learning environment
on the web for those taking a Newtonian Mechanics course. On the
PIVoT web site, you
can watch streaming videos of all 35 of Prof. Walter Lewin’s
8.01 lectures (taped in Fall 1999), available in full 50-minute
format as well as shorter, topic-specific segments. There are also
help sessions by Prof. Lewin in which he shows you how to solve
problems similar to the ones that will be assigned. You can access
an entire on-line textbook (Physics, 2nd ed., Hans Ohanian,
W.W. Norton Publishing Co.), interact with dynamic Java physics
simulations, and find answers to Frequently Asked Questions. You
might find it useful and we encourage you to check it out.
To access PIVoT, you must first register yourself at the PIVoT
site, http://curricula2.mit.edu/pivot/.
If you access the site from within the MIT domain, you should be
recognized as an MIT student and allowed to register. You will need
to be sure that your computer is equipped with RealPlayer 8 Basic
and IBM techexplorer. You might want to start at the test page,
https://curricula2.mit.edu/pivot/test.html,
to test these plug-ins and to download them if they are not working.
If you are using the RealOne Player, you will have to replace it
with RealPlayer 8 Basic to avoid some critical bugs.
PIVoT is still under development, but Walter Lewin has provided
some advice for using it effectively. You should NOT use the TOPIC
options, but instead should ONLY use the KEYWORD options. On selecting
a keyword, you will be presented with a menu. The ordering of the
items on the menu will not be useful, so you should read the descriptions
of each item to find what you are looking for. Each video clip is
listed with a letter code: L denotes videos from Prof. Lewin's lectures,
where L3 means Lecture 3, and L3e refers to a segment of the lecture
between L3d and L3f. WL denotes videos of Prof. Lewin filmed separately
from the lectures. SG indicates videos of Prof. Lewin explaining
the solutions to problems from the 8.01 Study Guide.
PIVoT is adding new accessibility features for the vision- and
hearing-impaired, including optional closed captioning, which you
can read about at
https://curricula2.mit.edu/pivot/help.html?acode=0x0008000#access.
These accessibility features will be increased by a new release
later this fall, and at that time ALL users will have to re-register
their accounts. We will tell you when this is about to happen.
Happy PIVoTing.
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