Educational Video: The PN Junction
Francisco M. Gomez-Campos presents a video on the principles of PN junctions in diodes (a Spanish version is also available).
Francisco M. Gomez-Campos writes:Hi all!
I’m Francisco M. Gómez Campos, assistant professor at Universidad de Granada, Spain. I work in the Department of Electronics and my background is Physics. I’m also a Blender Foundation Certified Trainer.
In the last years I leaded a group of professors and Ph. D. students to carry out educational videos on electronics using Blender. Two years ago we released a video about the MOSFET (Spanish and English versions), a widely used electronic device. This video had a very positive feedback from the audience, and now universities around the world use it in their degree studies. Interested people could have a further look on videos I developed using Blender looking for my YouTube channel “fmgomezcampos”.
This time we released a new video to explain how a diode works (particularly the pn junction inside it).
I’d be pleased to know the opinion of Blender users about the techniques I used in it. I used the Blender 2.63 version, including some scenes rendered in Cycles. I also tried doing compositing using video recording footage.
We are always grateful to the Blender community about their criticisms. They helped us to improve our videos. Please feel free to comment on the details you think should be improved.
Thanks for giving me the oportunity to communicate here our works in Blender!
Best Wishes,
Francisco M. Gómez Campos
Departamento de Electrónica y Tecnología de los Computadores
Universidad de Granada, Spain
Wonderfully clear and well paced description – and great diagrams of course! But the music is intrusive between 4:00 and 5:00. It serves no purpose whatsoever, except to distract the viewer from the narration.
Hi!
I’ve checked the music in that interval and I’ve taken note of it. Thank you very much for your comments!
Great video. My only suggestion would be to add a 337 ohms resistor in the power-supply/diode’s demo. The power-supply and diode experiment looks so realistic that a student could try to replicated it as shown in your video; It would burn out the diode (Icc would be limited only by the power supply’s current protection/limiter circuit).
Anyways… it is a great video.
Hi! Yes, you’re quite right about the realistic representation of experimental setups, we didn’t take that into account. We’ll consider that in our future videos: we’ll use schematic pictures for things like these, and realistic images for other purposes. Thank you very much for your kind support!
I remember seeing a study of science educational videos last year, which looked at their effectiveness at clearing up common misconceptions that the students had. The study contrasted a straight expository approach, versus one with additional question-and-answer segments which directly addressed those common misconceptions.
Viewers rated the question-and-answer versions as more confusing, but when they were tested on their understanding of the material, they scored higher with that approach.
Wow! Discussions on pedagogical approaches in Blendernation, I love this :-D Yes, I think I understand what you mean. Honestly I think that approach you mention is appealing. I’ll suggest the team to include, at least, a section about misconceptions in the next video we are planning to do. We’ll see what happens. Thank you very much for this idea! Brilliant!