RELATE Seminar: TODAY

We invite you to join us for the RELATE education seminar today (Friday May 3) at noon in room 26-201. Our speaker will be Zhongzhou Chen of UIUC, who is a candidate for a postdoc position in our group. His talk is entitled:

 

Visualizing the “invisible” physics: How computer animation may change the look of abstract concepts in online education

 

One of the great strength of online education lies in its unprecedented visualization power provided by computer graphics/animations, which is clearly useful in illustrating concrete information such as crystal structures and stellar motion. However, many of the important concepts and principles in physics, such as conservation laws and Maxwell’s equations, are abstract ideas whose underlying meaning is hard to visualize. Can computer animation also be useful in teaching those more abstract ideas? Can we find a set of guiding principles for designing more effective visual representations for STEM instructions, based on our understanding of how the human brain constructs abstract knowledge? 

 

In this talk I’ll introduce my initial attempts in trying to answer these questions as well as designing better animations/graphics for teaching physics. In order to understand how visual perception is related to abstract understanding, I utilized knowledge from a new branch of cognitive psychology: grounded cognition, and extended the existing multimedia learning model to include the construction of abstract knowledge. Based on this extended model, I created prototypes of animations with enhanced visual features, and tested their effectiveness in clinical settings. I will share with you both some encouraging initial results, and certain shortcomings identified with these prototype animations. I’ll also talk about the on-going effort to address those shortcomings, as well as possible future research and application in online eduction (e.g. MOOCs).