In 2015, I attended Georgetown University via an exchange program offered by the Brazilian government. There, I looked for teachers who had interest in physics education to see if I could lend some help, and also get hands-on experience.
I met professor Jim Freericks, who was working with undergrad student Dylan Cutler on a massive online open course (MOOC) for teaching quantum mechanics to non-scientists using Feynman’s path-integral formulation. I offered my help to develop a modular, dynamic simulation engine to be used in the course, which was to be used by Dylan and I for the interactive tutorials. Eventually, during 2016-2017, I was hired to design and create another set of interactive tutorials based on Daniel Styer's approach using the Stern-Gerlach experiment. These are all now available online at EdX as Quantum Mechanics for Everyone.
Course trailer.
The online course, which has had over 20 thousand students so far, has received universal acclaim, with particular praise to the interactive simulations, and was one of the 10 finalists in the 2018 EdX Prize. According to Class Central, the course is currently the 4th best rated MOOC of all time.
The details about our course are due to be published in The Physics Teacher journal in the near future. The pre-print is available on arXiv.
A stand-alone version of my 3D simulations is available here, although they require the context of the course to be fully appreciated.
The source code of the simulation engines and interactive tutorials are available on GitHub under the GLGPL License. I was responsible for both the QED and Stern-Gerlach engines and the Stern-Gerlach and probability tutorials. Dylan was responsible the PHOTON engine and its tutorials, and the visual design of the QED path integral tutorials. Both me and Dylan worked on the QED tutorials.
Single slit diffraction explained using Richard Feynman's path integral formulation on the QED engine. See interactive version
Thin-film interference explained using Richard Feynman's path integral formulation on the QED engine. See interactive version
Explanation of precession and deflection of a current loop in a non-uniform magnetic field, before the notion of spin can be introduced. These 3D tutorials are on the Stern-Gerlach Engine I designed and developed.
See interactive version
For the Stern-Gerlach engine, I designed a series of unique and intuitive abstract "devices" to build upon the concepts we needed. Below, we see on the left a source of atoms, followed by three Stern-Gerlach Analyzers and two particle detectors at the end. Notice that the Stern-Gerlach analyzers can be "plugged" into one another. This is used later on to emphasize that we can only analyze quantum experiments by the detection probabilities.
Explanation of collapse of quantum states using Daniel Styer's approach with Stern-Gerlach Analyzers. See interactive version
Explaining quantum mechanics with these Stern-Gerlach experiments is very versatile. In our course, we managed to cover very advanced topics in quantum mechanics such as the EPR Paradox and Bell's Inequalities in a very accessible way.
Explanation of local hidden variables in Bell's inequality.
See interactive version
The success of this course shows that it is not necessary to "dumb down" explanations of complex topics to a lay audience. New multimedia approaches to teaching have a lot of latent potential!