Social Media as a Museum of Science and Math

Please join us Monday December 3, 2018, for a discussion of using social media in physics outreach and education hosted by Dr. Ray Hall!

Physics education has traditionally incorporated demonstrations as a best practice in teaching, partly because physical phenomena are dynamic in nature– static images are rarely able to convey the underlying principles, or illustrate the surprisingly counter intuitive aspects of the real world. The social media platform Instagram allows the wide distribution of short high resolution video clips, which turns out to be an ideal format for sharing interesting physics phenomena to engage the public in the excitement of science. The Instagram stream @physicsfun features a daily short video post that showcases physics toys, kinetic art, mathematical objects, and scientific curiosities from my personal collection. In this talk I will highlight the history and science of some famous physics toys, discuss the motivation and methods of capturing them on video, and describe the reaction so far: Over 1 million Instagram users subscribing to a social media museum of science and math.

Who: Dr. Ray Hall, California State University, Fresno.

When: December 3, 2018 at 7PM

Where: Santa Fe Basque, 3110 N Maroa Ave., Fresno, CA 93704