Brain Rules OK!

I started to watch the video, sitting in my study at home, late Wednesday evening and to my surprise, or rather intrigue, one of the first things that Dr John Medina said was, “The brain appears to have been designed to solve problems related to surviving in an unstable outdoor environment and to do so in near constant motion” and that most modern classrooms and business cubicles are designed seemingly completely the opposite.

At the end of the site on Brain rule #4, we don’t pay attention to boring things, is a power point presentation – of all things, denouncing power point presentations! Also, the message in the power point is that “passively sitting is a very unnatural thing. Audiences have no patience for tedium.” I read this after sitting listening to his presentation (including power points) for 52 minutes and 10 seconds. He was presenting to an audience who was sitting relatively passively and listening! What he said was interesting, but I wasn’t in the least sitting passively. Apart from the fact that I was making notes… I made toast and ate it, I got a drink, I watched the rain out of the window, I looked a the titles of some of the books on my bookshelf, I got annoyed by the noises from the printer and then moved it, I patted the cat, I checked on the dogs… get the point?

Then in the very same rule, it says that the brain cannot multi-task and that it has to undergo 4 processed to switch from one to the other and that it can lead to a lot less productivity. Yes, it’s true, it’s taken me longer to view the video than just sitting here watching it straight through. But if I did that… then I would have tuned out after 10 minutes!

OK, so how can I relate these brain rules to my teaching? In particular, stimulating multiple senses simultaneously?

In Physics and Engineering, this would seem pretty straight forward – have the students stand up, move around and do short experiments and explain the Physics to them while they are doing these experiments. Have them change a condition in the experiment every 10 minutes so that something different happens and interest is maintained. This allows them to receive visual, tactile and auditory information all at once. Then repeat the experiments and facts several times in one session, and repeat the session in another class 2 hours later, of course avoiding the 1:30 – 3:30pm timeslot (nap time, but that doesn’t matter because it is consolidating the information anyway). AND relate the experiment somehow to something emotional/exiting/personal to encode the experiments in a more complex – therefore memorable – manner.

Easy? That’s actually quite doable for on-campus students. But for flex students… it is somewhat more difficult. My students have nearly all said that the videos I do of diagrams and solving problems and me walking backwards and forwards across the room to show displacement really help. So would me videoing the experiments work? Probably somewhat. I guess, however, that designing experiments that they can do at home would be even better.

We did do that with exponential decay. We had the students poor a carbonated beverage into a glass and measure the froth head. Then design an experiment to determine the rate the head went down. This also encoded the learning with a more complex situation – and undoubtedly, every time the student had a carbonated beverage, they would recall the exponential decay rule for the froth.

Now how to do that for nuclear physics without invoking Fukushima Daiichi in every student’s house???