The Savvy Technologist

Video capture in the science classroom

I was a high school science teacher before I got into ed tech full time. Just about the time I was leaving my teaching job at Henry Sibley High School, we bought some of the Vernier sensor and software products. Unfortunately, I never had a good chance to use them before I moved over to my current job in Hopkins. As cool as those sensors are, setting up a moderately complex physics experiment can still be pretty complicated. Thanks to what appears to be a new feature of Vernier’s Logger Pro 3 software, it’s now possible to do some really interesting experiments using video captured from a digital video camera.

I had the pleasure of making a visit back at my old stomping grounds yesterday and got a demo of the software from my former colleague Peter Bohacek. He showed me some video clips of spinning wheels and gyrating slinkies and the graphs that were produced from the video analysis. What a great tool! Why set up a ramp and roll balls down it to calculate the acceleration of gravity when you can do it by analyzing video of a student throwing a football? All of the labs Peter showed me seemed much more authentic when analyzed with the video. The data looked great and the students really seemed to understand it. I will definitely be showing this to the science department in my district.