Capstone Project

These videos have recently been posted to Youtube so students will be able to use them as educational aides. Watching these videos back after a semester of tutor training, they seem as though they will help students or people who are interested in learning about Math and Physics concepts. Creating these videos has also taught us a lot about teaching and learning. Rewatching ourselves explain these concepts has helped us learn to communicate better. We will use everything we have learned in our future tutoring sessions. We also look forward to any feedback we will receive.

We have finished recording our videos and have one left to edit. We are very excited about how they have turned out and cannot wait to share them. We ended up changing from related rates problems to  chain rule and implicit differentiation problems. I currently tutor at the Math and Stats Learning Center on Ohio State’s campus and have noticed that chain rule and implicit differentiation is something that a lot of students struggle with. These are concepts that will be used later on in the course and it is important to have a good understanding of them so we decided to focus on these concepts. We are so excited to share our videos with students who can use them as teaching aids.

Working on this project has taught me a lot about teaching and learning. I have also learned a lot about creating videos and the resources available to help with that. The room we are able to record in has a lot to offer us and has made recording our videos much better. When we record our videos we record for over an hour because we often repeat things multiple times. This gives us the option to choose which wording works the best and helps to make sure we are communicating as effectively as possible. One problem we have had is that this is too long to record without stopping. The first video we recorded only captured fifteen minutes of our hour long recording and we had to redo the whole thing. We have learned to split the video up into sections to record and then put it together when we edit.

We have recorded our first two videos and plan on editing them completely over winter break. Then we will watch and decide what we like and dislike and how we can improve for our last two videos. Another problem we have had is trying to decide the best way to test the effectiveness of these videos. This is something we are still trying to figure out. We would like to have someway to make sure they would truly help people who don’t understand the concepts we are trying to explain.

For our capstone project, we plan on creating four videos about STEM topics. The topics we have chose are hyperbolic trigonometry, related rates, general problem solving for physics, and projectile motion. We plan on recording our projectile motion video first because we have some ideas that we want to try for that one and test the video’s effectiveness before we record the rest of the videos.

We found a place on campus that is made to record educational videos and we plan on using this resource. After recording our first video, we will edit it and then review it and decide what changes we would like to make. We plan on doing one video at a time to start so we know how effective our communication is in general. We will then make changes and know what to focus on before recording the other three videos. We hope to have everything recorded by Thanksgiving break so we can edit on break and have all of the videos recorded and edited before finals this semester.

When we get back for Spring semester, we will test the effectiveness and go from there on if we need to record again or edit the videos more. Then we will focus on our Capstone Research Paper and how we want to present our project at the Research Symposium!

Our capstone project is going to consist of creating four educational videos in STEM areas. The four concepts we want to create videos for right now are: hyperbolic trigonometry, related rates, general problem solving for Physics problems, and projectile motion. Our videos are going to be supplements for students who are learning about these topics or are just interested in them. Abstract math tends to be very difficult for students when they come to college. They are used to focusing on more concrete math questions. It can be hard to visualize and understand what is happening when working with abstract math concepts. Our goal is to break these down and give some concrete examples to help students with abstract math and physics topics.

Math and physics are both difficult topics to learn, but many STEM students have to take many of these courses and learn a lot of abstract topics. According to Wiggins (2018), “Results in one field can suggest concepts and ideas to be explored in a related field. Occasionally, methods and techniques developed in one field can be directly applied to another field to create similar results”. It’s important that students in STEM majors understand these abstract math and physics topics so that they can apply them to their own area of study.

There are many benefits of educational videos. According to Bevan (2017), educational videos increase student engagement, offer flexibility, and increase knowledge retention. Students are used to watching videos all the time, so why shouldn’t they be able to learn that way as well? The goal of our project is to make learning difficult math and physics problems easier and more enjoyable for students.

References

Bevan, M. (2017, January 31). Why Videos are Important in Education. Retrieved October 24, 2019, from                                                    https://www.nextthoughtstudios.com/video-production-blog/2017/1/31/why-videos-are-important-in-education.

Wiggins, H. Z. (2018, February 28). Real-life maths or abstract maths? Why abstraction is so amazing. Retrieved October 23,                2019, from https://www.parent24.com/Learn/Primary-school/helping-our-kids-understand-maths-through-                                    abstraction-and-application-20180228.