by Donna Iadipaolo
A LONG-TIME ANN Arbor resident and former traditional, brick-and-mortar classroom science teacher, is transforming the way thousands of teachers, students, and the general public think and learn about physics through his brain-child “Flipping Physics.”
Since 2013, educator Jonathan Thomas-Palmer has been essentially a one-man show. He describes himself as Flipping Physics’ Chief Executive Officer, Chief Creative Officer, Chief Financial Officer, web designer, videographer, and sole employer. He combines theater, online learning, video effects and more to make physics come alive. He helps teachers and students learn about physics more dynamically.
The idea of flipping physics puts the emphasis on devoting time to listen to lectures in one’s free time, making learning more hands-on. The method emphasizes a more student-centered classroom, and having content be more student-centered, laid-back, and entertaining.
“Flipping Physics is dedicated to providing free, entertaining and real physics educational videos for anyone to use to learn physics and, more specifically, for teachers to use to flip their students’ learning,” said Thomas-Palmer.
Thomas-Palmer has created three student personas to further dramatize physics topics.
“Oh wait, I forgot about Billy, Bobby and Bo, my three unique physics students who attend all of my lectures, so I guess there are actually 4 employees,” he said. “However, they are all me, so how does that work?”
Thomas-Palmer utilizes special effects in his video to play his three students (Billy, Bobby, and Bo) in his videos learning about physics along with the teacher leading the class about a certain concept. The three types of students are humorously, at first glance, somewhat stereotypical renditions of students: a preppy nerd, a beef-cake jock, and a tie-dye hippie. Yet, all eventually and happily persevere and master the science and mathematical materials presented in the videos.
“I posted my first Billy, Bobby and Bo video in February of 2013, however, I didn’t really get started until I retired from Northville (High School) in August of 2013,” according to Thomas-Palmer.
Jonathan Thomas-Palmer has a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering and a Masters of Arts in Education both from the University of Michigan. For 13 years he taught high school physics including General Physics, College Prep Physics, AP Physics B, AP Physics C: Mechanics and AP Physics C: Electricity and Magnetism at Northville High School. AP Physics B is an algebra-based course and AP Physics C is a calculus-based physics course.
In the short-time that Flipping Physics has been available since 2013, Thomas-Palmer has already received important notoriety.
“I am a 2014 ‘Awesome Without Boarders Grantee’,” divulged Thomas-Palmer. “I was a finalist for a 2014 EduBlog Award in the category ‘Best Educational Use of Media.’ I placed 4th out of 25.”
The grant was issued as a way to support a “program that creates and shares free videos physics teachers can use to flip their own classrooms.” Thomas-Palmer argues that his Flipping Physics is better then most online learning.
“Most of the free, online, physics educational videos are a PowerPoint presentation with a voice over,” said Thomas-Palmer. “Flipping Physics instead has an actual teacher with three students who are learning the material along with the viewer. This creates a situation where questions are asked and answered, mistakes are made and corrected and concepts are repeated by a different speaker in a slightly different way to help with understanding.”
Also, instead of only presenting abstract concepts or isolated symbolic formulas, Thomas-Palmer provides real-world, entertaining contexts.
“There are also many real world scenarios shown and analyzed. For example, I rode my bicycle off a dock into a lake to show the force of impact on a helmet (http://www.flippingphysics.com/helmet.html), a quadcopter drone was used for an aerial view of two cars to introduce relative motion (http://www.flippingphysics.com/introduction-to-relative-motion.html), I used a catapult to show projectile motion (http://www.flippingphysics.com/nerd-a-pult.html), and I rode on a skateboard to demonstrate frames of reference (http://www.flippingphysics.com/skateboarding.html),” according to Thomas-Palmer.
He went on to say: “This creates a real, immersive and entertaining experience that far exceeds a PowerPoint presentation.”
So who’s viewing his videos? Thomas-Palmer has crunched the numbers.
“YouTube/Google provide numerous statistics,” explained Thomas-Palmer. “I could spend my days trying to analyze all of them. Here are a few: during the last four months of 2014 my videos were viewed approximately 114,000 times; they were watched for a total of approximately 1.1 years and approximately 25 percent of that occurred in outside of the United States.”
The national as well as international appeal of the videos are notable.
“My videos have been used to supplement learning at one local high school that I know of, however, one of the benefits of being online is that the videos are available to anyone with Internet access,” stated Thomas-Palmer. “There are schools in Colorado Springs, Colorado; Houston, Texas; Zapopan, Mexico; Quezon City, Philippines; and London, England that utilize Flipping Physics.”
Although Thomas-Palmer does most of the work himself, he occasionally enlists the helps of others, including his own family.
“There have been eight people so far who have volunteered to film themselves and appear in the videos,” said Thomas-Palmer. “My wife watches every video and makes suggestions. My children even sometimes appear in the videos. I have also had eight volunteers translate video subtitles to Swedish, Vietnamese, Slovenian, Korean, Romanian, Chinese, Polish and Spanish” http://www.flippingphysics.com/translate.html
As far as funding is concern, Thomas-Palmer receives approximately 0.3 cents per video view, but stated the primary method of funding of Flipping Physics is through user donations.
“I have made about 10 times as much money from donations as I have from advertisements. I also received a $1000 grant from the Awesome without Borders Foundation,” said Thomas-Palmer.