other – Adventures in Oceanography and Teaching

Guest post by Alice Langhans: Scientific reasons why the ocean boosts mental health

mglessmer — Thu, 31 Jan 2019 09:09:25 +0000

My friend Alice runs a really interesting Instagram account that I love following. She posts about being a PhD student in physics didactics, does #experimentalfriday (which you might remember from her recent guest post on my blog), gives helpful advice for mental health topics and takes beautiful pictures. Check it out — @scied_alice. A couple of […]

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Playing with roll wave animations

mglessmer — Wed, 30 Jan 2019 07:25:32 +0000

I love how powerful Powerpoint is, at the same time there surely is a way out there to create these kind of animations with a little less copy & pasting, and especially without manually moving tons of stuff by juuust a tiny little bit from frame to frame? How would you build these kinds of […]

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Fictitious forces (4/5): Coriolis – how not to teach it

mglessmer — Thu, 26 Jan 2017 09:25:54 +0000

Some demonstrations are really not as clever as we thought they might be. We have talked about how to teach aspects of the Coriolis force recently, and just to spice it up: here is one thing that I tried that totally didn’t work out. The idea was to have one student slowly and steadily turn a […]

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Reflections in a cylinder

mglessmer — Wed, 11 Nov 2015 09:41:35 +0000

Sometimes you find the most exciting examples in the most random places. Like here, for example: Straight lines being reflected on a cylinder.

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On vorticity

mglessmer — Mon, 25 May 2015 09:37:51 +0000

I’ve promised a long time ago to write a post on vorticity (Hallo Geli! :-)). So here it comes! Vorticity is one of the concepts in oceanography that is often taught via its mathematical formulation, and which is therefore pretty difficult to grasp for those of us with less mathematical training. But it’s also a […]

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Transit of Venus and upcoming solar eclipse on March 20th!

mglessmer — Mon, 16 Mar 2015 11:36:54 +0000

In 2012, I happened to be at an ESWN workshop in Madison, WI, when, during one of the breaks, one of the participants mentioned that it might be possible to get into the historic Washburn Observatory to watch Venus’ transit. Of course I had to go! We stood in a very long queue under overcast skies […]

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How can we use interactive flow simulations in teaching of hydrodynamics?

mglessmer — Fri, 27 Feb 2015 12:43:36 +0000

That was quite a teaser on Wednesday, wasn’t it? I said I had the solution to any hydrodynamics problem you might want to illustrate. So here we go: I recently had the privilege to be given a private demonstration of the “Elbe” flow solver, which is being developed at Hamburg University of Technology. Elbe allows […]

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Exploding water balloons – again!

mglessmer — Fri, 20 Feb 2015 11:14:44 +0000

I am usually very motivated to write posts for this blog, but for some reason today I’m not. I have interesting posts scheduled for next week, don’t you worry, but today was supposed to be a review of some literature on teaching and learning, and I just cannot be bothered. So instead you’ll get this: As you’ll […]

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Guest post: ‘OCEAN DRIFTERS – a secret world beneath the waves’

mglessmer — Mon, 16 Feb 2015 10:40:54 +0000

Today, I am very excited to share with you a guest post by Dr Richard Kirby, who recently produced an amazingly beautiful film on plankton (linked at the very bottom of this post, a MUST SEE!) Dr Richard Kirby – the Plankton Pundit @planktonpundit, tells us why it is important not to overlook the plankton: […]

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Dictionary oceanography terms English-Norwegian-German – Work in progress: we need you!

mglessmer — Fri, 06 Feb 2015 10:36:53 +0000

For anyone interested: a couple of years ago we started working on a collection of translations of oceanography terms in English, Norwegian and German. If you find it useful, please feel free to use and share it! Oceanography terms: English – Norwegian – German This dictionary is definitely a work in progress. If you find […]

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