... in 1990, he came across articles written by David Hestenes, a physicist at Arizona State. Hestenes got the idea for the series when a colleague came to him with a problem. The students in his introductory physics courses were not doing well: Semester after semester, the class average never got above about 40 percent. "I noted that the reason for that was that his examination questions were mostly qualitative, requiring understanding of the concepts rather than just calculational, using formulas, which is what most of the instructors did," Hestenes says. Hestenes had a suspicion students were just memorizing the formulas and never really getting the concepts. So he and a colleague developed a test to look at students' conceptual understanding of physics. ... more »

Road Runner cartoons can easily and meaningfully be worked into the physics and physical science curriculum. Many vignettes involve fairly direct misrepresentations of specific physical principles. I developed the table below for my own use in deciding which clips to show and when. The two compilation videos are still in print as far as I know. I hope you find the information useful. (An asterisk denotes a particularly useful cartoon or vignette.) ... more »