Humour Pdf

Using Humour to Engage the Student Andrew Robinson Physics and Engineering Physics

Humour in the Lecture • Can be useful to keep the students engaged • Break up long or “dry” sections of the lecture • Keep the students thinking “What is the Prof going to do next?”

And make ‘em laugh!

Things Not To Do • Insult or make fun of any student • Any hint of racist, sexist or any other –ist jokes

Self Deprecating Humour • I play the “Eccentric Brit” card shamelessly • Highlight differences in British and Canadian English

Techniques I have found useful • • • • • •

Self Deprecating Humour Anecdotes Amusing Examples of Physical Principles Physical Comedy The Absurd Answer The “How Not To Do Something” strategy

• I counterbalance the “British” card by always highlighting “Canadian” achievements Spacewalk by Chris Hadfield or Steve Maclean when talking about Newton’s Third Law “Action and Reaction are Equal and Opposite”

e.g. Thrust SST Supersonic car http://www.exn.ca/iss/index.cfm?URL=http://www.exn.ca/iss/hadfield2.cfm

The Magnetic North Pole is in Canadian territory (for now) http://gsc.nrcan.gc.ca/geomag/nmp/long_mvt_nmp_e.php

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If I make a mistake on a slide… • Then in the next lecture I highlight it with a pear symbol

Anecdotes • Add some colour to the lecture by telling stories that happened to you – e.g. The radioactive watch story

• “Pear shaped” is a British idiom for something going wrong

Tacoma Narrows Bridge Disaster

• Or to someone else – e.g. The Tacoma Narrows Bridge

Millennium Footbridge in London, England

• Tacoma Narrows Bridge , Washington State USA • Suspension Bridge Collapse 1940 • Forced vibration of the bridge due to the wind

Pedestrians only Had to be closed shortly after it was opened because of violent lateral (sideways) oscillations

Tacoma Bridge Link

Amusing Examples

The Poiseuille Equation

• Textbook examples are often very tedious • Spice things up with some funny examples

• This has to do with speed of flow of a viscous fluid in a pipe

– A very good source of examples come from the Ig-Nobel Prizes http://www.improb.com/ig.html

Typical Problem:

A 1.3 m length of horizontal pipe has a radius of 6.4×10-3 m. Water flows with a volume flow rate 9.0×10-3 m3/s out of the right hand side of the pipe into the air. What is the pressure at the left hand end if the water is viscous, with η = 1.0x10-3 Pa.s Pretty tedious!

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The Penguin Poo problem • Ig-Nobel prize winners 2005 in Fluid Dynamics Polar Biology paper

Uses the Poiseuille equation to predict the force of expulsion of the penguin poo, and hence how far it is thrown from the nest

“Physical” Comedy 1

Other good Ig-Nobel examples: • World’s slowest dropping liquid experiment (viscosity) • Fatalities cause by coconuts falling from trees (kinematics, kinetic energy, conservation of energy, gravitational potential energy) • The teenager repelling device (limit of human hearing changes with age)

The Tesla Probe and Electron Stream in a Magnetic Field Demo

• Lecture Demonstrations – Requires some experience to be able to make the demonstration amusing and informative (and make sure it works) – Audience Participation is helpful

“Physical” Comedy 2 • Act out the situation! – For example, become a transverse wave propagating in the lecture theatre

• Make sound effects! – For example, the Doppler Effect http://www.wfu.edu/Academicdepartments/Physics/demolabs/demos/3/3b/3 B40xx.html

• Give the class the essential information about the physics • Frame it in an entertaining manner!

Make gentle fun of the absurd • Is the calculated answer sensible? – CD with diameter of 40 metres – Supersonic Police Cars – Trucks with mass 10,000 tons – Road collisions with 50 kT release of kinetic energy – Astronaut with a mass of 143 tons – Ion drive spacecraft moving 3 mm in 2 years

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Not only from the students • I had a typo on my lecture slide discussing the size of the atomic nucleus • Real size 10-15 m • I wrote 1015 m = 1,000,000,000,000 km! • Big Atom!

The How Not to Do Something Strategy

From the sublime to the ridiculous

Effective Powerpoint Presentations • I use this technique to emphasise how easy it is to do a BAD Powerpoint presentation! • Used in Phys 898 Special topics: Communication skills and in EP490 seminar classes

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