Learning physics from unphysical scenes in anime

Tomo Goto^1*, Terry Phan¹, Deriyan Senjaya¹, Angel Rodriguez¹

¹Institute of Astronomy, National Tsing Hua University, Hsinchu, Taiwan

* Presenter:Tomo Goto, email:tomo@gapp.nthu.edu.tw

At the end of our three-hour classes, it is not uncommon for students to exhibit signs of fatigue, causing a noticeable decline in their attentiveness to the lecture. This is particularly evident during physics/cosmology classes when numerous theoretical equations are introduced. How can we get tired students back into the lecture? How can we keep them interested in the class content? Last year, I tried to answer this ambitious question by incorporating science fiction (SF) movies in the class. I asked students to identify unphysical scenes in the SF movies, explain why they were unphysical, and demonstrate what would happen if the scene followed the correct physics laws. The experiment was a huge success. Young generations of students like science fiction movies. Students immediately got interested in this project and enthusiastically started watching the movies from a physicist’s viewpoint. As examples, some students pointed out that Anna’s motion in the movie, Frozen, is unphysical and demonstrated what would happen in reality. Other students showed that the soccer ball in Shaolin soccer cannot burn using realistic energy calculations. In all students’ presentations, it was very noticeable that students were having fun, perhaps much more so than answering quizzes in exams. I believe this project was a big success in terms of stimulating students' interest in learning physics. Following this success, I would like to propose learning physics in anime. Many young generations of students like anime, sometimes more so than movies such as Attack on Titan, Demon Slayer, and Jujutsu Kaisen. Unfortunately, they are out of the authors' imagination and, thus, often full of unphysical phenomena/scenes, impossible to happen in the real world. Unlike movies where most scenes are filmed with real actors, anime is 100% a product of imagination. Therefore, creators’ inaccurate understanding of physics can more easily be reflected in the scenes. More unphysical scenes are expected in anime. In this sense, anime might be a better teaching material than movies. In this project, (i) an unphysical scene in an anime will be selected as the topic of the week. (ii) Students will try to identify the problem and explain why it is unphysical. (iii) By the end of the semester, a corrected version based on physics laws will be created by students. The expected benefits are as follows; (i) Because we start not from a thick textbook, but from their favorite anime. Students will be interested from the start. (ii) It is (almost) a real-world experience in finding what is unphysical in the anime using the physics knowledge related to the class. Students will foster critical thinking without noticing. (iii) We will make a resulting list of unphysical sciences in anime publicly available, with all of them attached with the detailed physical explanations. This will be a useful educational resource for much broader range of students, not limited to those who registered for the class. (iv) Students will acquire a scientist’s eye to watch anime in the future, possibly identifying unphysical scenes in anime. Such an attitude to see the truth of nature would be one of the important purposes of learning physics. (v) Such a unique attempt to teach physics will motivate more and more students to learn it. The effect will not be limited to the registered students but could expand university-wide and to students all around Taiwan in multiple generations.

Keywords: anime, problem-based learning, self-learning, physics, cartoons