Swedish newspaper reported IR research with pupils

Swedish newspaper Norrköpings Tidningar reported today our international collaboration with Konrad Schönborn and Jesper Haglund at Linköping University on educational research that is aimed at uncovering the cognitive power of IR imaging for science education. If you don't understand Swedish, the title translates into “The heat camera can become important in school physics.” Jenny Sajjadi, a teacher in math and physics, was quoted as saying: “Physics is seen as an ‘old’ subject and this is a bit of new thinking that can increase the students’ interest. For me as a teacher, it is an entrance to deeper teaching.”

Modern handheld IR cameras deliver tremendous power equivalent to thousands of temperature sensors. This kind of Very Large Scale Integrated Sensing System (VLSISS, my coinage in parallel to VLSI circuits that have revolutionized computing) is about to change the landscape of scientific inquiry in the classroom. It opens up learning opportunities that have never been seen before. This US-Sweden collaboration will advance this agenda. As the first step, the collaborative project will provide some pivotal data for how augmented visualization (to the sense of touch) could be a good intervention to notoriously hardy misconceptions related to heat and temperature. See my earlier blog post about this.