An audiovisual route to instruction

To provide students multiple points of reference about challenging ideas, such as acceleration due to gravity and the basics of simple machines, Crowder develops fun and informative videos. Students often need to review these concepts more than once to fully understand the components they need to know. The videos allow them to review the content they’ve learned, which is especially bene cial when they are doing schoolwork at home.

Among Crowder’s Camtasia projects is a series of ve videos about motion physics. Through the software, Crowder is able to incorporate his own images, animations, classroom videos and more. Each video is ve minutes on average, meaning each time a student refers to the video for the basic information already covered in class, Crowder saves valuable time by not having to repeat content. Instead, Crowder can focus on expanding on what he’s already taught the students.

The firrst video of the series alone has more than 27,000 views.  A part of the video includes a demonstration of Crowder dropping strings with washers spaced out at di erent lengths to show the e ects of acceleration from gravity. In the video, he is able to expand on the in-person demonstration with additional animations of what occurs when the strings drop, and di erent examples of the same phenomena, including a sky diver exiting an airplane.

“When the students rst see the video, they are often in shock that I was able to put all of this together,” said Crowder. “Most of my computer skills are self-taught, and Camtasia is intuitive enough to pick up easily.”