The PSSC didactic movies, some “old friends” revisited through modern teaching technologies

An evergreen problem affecting the management of distance learning is the difficulty to devise laboratories suitable to either synchronous or asynchronous e-learning. The relevance of these activities is inevitably clear as fundamental step toward the development of additional skills/abilities for our students. Today, thanks to the continuous R&D activities put in place by Institutions, a plenty of different solutions are available/usable to provide realistically reliable experimental activities to e-courses. By this paper we want to propose a novel solution to the previous problem. In a few words, we have restored old didactical movies (anyway available). The Physical Science Study committee (PSSC) between the 50s and 60s prepared the originals. The activity of this group, hosted at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was devoted to devise new teaching approaches. In particular, PSSC aimed to supply learning materials able to communicate to students a methodological approach more than the brute memorization of the concepts. They were looking for a veritable and deep understanding of the discussed arguments. The materials realized by PSSC include several textbooks and a large number of didactical documentaries. We used these documentaries to realize a modern learning product which at once restores the original PSSC spirit and enriches it of presently available multimedia contents. Using modern technologies we built a 3D virtual laboratory blending special portions of the original movies with additional video materials, computer simulations and self-assessment activities. Our final product is composed by ten “physics pills” each of this dedicated to a specific argument of General and Applied Physics courses. The insertion of new materials, the presence of the instructor with the role to explain and lead students, together with the realization in agreement with responsive technology offers the possibility to learn in a different and modern way preserving the veritable charm of a laboratory.