Librarians Usha Gupta and Luti Salisbuary here at the University of Arkansas asked Greg Salamo of the Physics Department to collaborate on a proposal to the National Science Digital Library. Always looking for ways to increase the role of the library in supporting science education, the librarians knew of Professor Salamo's great interest in education.

Professor Salamo, in turn, he suggested that Dave Wall might be useful in this project.

Dave Wall has long been interested in encouraging more and better live classroom science demonstrations. He pointed out that, as the Mazur Group at Harvard has demonstrated, it is not at all obvious how to present a physics demonstration – not if it is to improve student understanding.

As discussed in Joe Redish’s beautiful book on Teaching Physics With the Physics Suite, it is not even obvious how to engage the class’s attention. Many young physics teachers have had to learn this the hard way. Those of us who have been there are looking for ways to help the next generation of science teachers.

Since we propose to start the collection by video recording of locally famous demonstrators in live performances in public shows using one of our collaborators, Dave Wall, as a Master of Ceremonies, we would like to provide a brief history of his Physics of Magic show.

History of Physics of Magic

In an email to a colleague, Dave Wall wrote the following narrative story about the need for a video resource such as the one proposed

Narrative of A critical time in a young science teacher's career

In doing research to determine the state of the art, the following resources have been examined.

Resources examined