More Than a Promise

For more than a generation the promise of education by television has remained largely a promise. It turns out that students learn better from live teachers in the classroom than from lectures on television. One reason is that lectures on television are usually just lectures on television. The teacher speaks to the camera as to the class, which makes for not-very-exciting viewing.

Largely unnoticed on this season’s television bill of fare has been an extraordinary piece of educational television called “The Mechanical Universe.” The reason it has been largely unnoticed is that it’s a first-year physics course taught by David L. Goodstein, a professor of physics at Caltech. Goodstein’s lectures, taped at an actual freshman course, introduce and conclude each day’s class. In between, the viewer gets a specially devised telecourse in first-year physics, complete with splendid computer animations by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s James Blinn, who does the simulations for NASA’s planetary fly-bys. The creators of this series, backed by a $6-million grant from the Annenberg/CPB Project, tackled an enormously difficult task. Physics cannot be taught without mathematics, and if differential calculus is not television’s Supreme Test, it would certainly make the semifinals in any competition. The formulas go by very quickly, which means that people who aren’t interested can ignore them, and people who are interested can refer to a supplementary textbook.

The series is being shown on stations around the country, including KCET and KABC in Los Angeles and KPBS in San Diego, and on other public and cable stations. But it may be hard toget to it. On KABC it’s on Tuesdays and Thursdays at 5 a.m., KCET airs it on Mondays and Wednesdays at 3:30 p.m., and KPBS does it on Tuesdays and Thursdays at 5:30 p.m. People interested in physics could learn much from the 26 half-hour programs. People interested in making educational television more effective could also learn from it.