Another Coursera course that I’ve been taking at around the same time was How Things Work, by Louis Bloomfield of the University of Virginia. It’s a high school-level physics course that covers motion and basic mechanics. It should be too easy for me and I originally picked it only because my wife wanted to and wanted me to accompany her. It the end, I learned much more than I expected to. As it turned out, having some idea of the principles of physics isn’t the same as being to intuitively understand and internalize them.
The course rams home the point by starting you off with a preliminary assessment of what you already know. There’s no real math in this course, so the assessment, like the weekly homework quizzes, work by asking about hypothetical real-world situations. As example of this would be asking how much force you are using if you are moving a cupboard at a constant velocity across the floor. I expected to totally ace the preliminary assessment since I thought I already knew high school physics, but I ended up doing rather badly.
What’s especially interesting about this course is that rather than starting with principles, it starts with ordinary objects explaining the physics of how they work and goes on to the principles from there. That’s why each episode is themed after an object, for example, “Skating”, “Falling Balls” and “Ramps”. The professor does bring in some equations, but only to explain the relationships between different physical quantities, not to force students to use them to solve problems. I also like he turns around some the equations. For example, the traditional formulation for force is F = ma but he prefers to state it as a = F / m because acceleration is the quantity that we observe more readily and therefore want to explain.
Some of the video segments are really long, being over 20 minutes, compared to most other courses on Coursera. Surprisingly, they’re never boring. It helps that the material isn’t too difficult to understand but what matters more is the professor’s infectious enthusiasm for the subject and his seemingly child-like perspective of the world. He is perfectly willing for example to put himself in a toy wagon to roll himself down ramps or toss bowling balls out of a window to illustrate his points. This helps make the video lectures entertaining.
I do find that he gets overly pedantic at times. It really isn’t necessary to demonstrate every possible permutation of a phenomenon. And yet he does at times use some words without taking the time to explain exactly what he means in the present context, for example, the word “wobble”. But since this course is made to cater for everyone from primary school children to retirees, I’d say he strikes an excellent balance.
The course ends with the same assessment it started with, and I was very pleased to see how the lectures successfully altered my intuitions on motion and basic mechanics. Apparently this is supposed to be the only the first of many planned seasons. But the sequels will only be made if the professor gets more support to do so. I would be very excited to see this educational approach extended to more complex topics in physics, my favourite choice being electricity which I really should know more about but actually know very little. As such I heartily recommend this course to anyone.