Susanne Horn being filmed by (far left) CAT Producer-Directors Sean and Kim in their amazing studio, assisted by Jon (and myself) for the all-important phone footage.

During this past summer, core DIYnamicist Jon Aurnou and a group of fellow DIYnamicists and members of Jon’s SPINLab worked with UCLA’s Office of Instructional Development (since renamed to the UCLA Center for the Advancement of Teaching, or CAT) to produce four amazing videos that are now live on our YouTube channel (and embedded in this post below the text). The videos show how to build and use our classic Lego table, how to build a version of our upcoming Whale table, how to create “barbasoloscope” fluid for visualization, and how to perform various demonstrations on the Whale.

CAT has an amazing studio space on UCLA’s campus where the videos were filmed. I crashed the production for an hour or so to see the pros (i.e. Kim and Sean from OID) and the semi-pros (the rest of us) at work and capture some behind-the-scenes photos. Later on, Norris, Henry, Yufan, and Susanne each recorded their voice overs for their video. Then, OID took everything and edited down to four excellent videos.

We’re extremely grateful to CAT for this opportunity, in particular to Sean Cruser and Kim Cohen for their excellent camerawork, direction, and editing. We would love to make more high-level videos like this moving forward…Hollywood, look out! UCLA is just a few miles away after all :)

OID Video #1: Norris describes and shows how to build the DIYnamics Project’s LEGO Table, for use at all levels in teaching basic ocean and atmospheric type fluid dynamics

OID Video #2: Henry Gonzalez walks you through how to set up a Sherline CNC Rotary Table Indexer (https://www.sherline.com). We are using this Sherline system as a base for the DIYnamics 1 meter diameter “Whale” table

OID Video #3: Yufan Xu makes a batch of “Barbasoloscope” visualization fluid, approximately following the recipe given in Borrero-Echeverry et al. Physics of Fluids, 2018

OID Video #4: Susanne Horn carries out experiments on the DIYnamics 1 m Whale Table. Because we did not correctly filter out the oils from this batch of Barbasoloscope, it is somewhat difficult to see the full glory of the Barbasoloscope in action. Whoops!