The authors have taught as colleagues at Kempele Ylikylä Primary School students aged 13-15 years, in the positions of physics and mathematics teacher. They have shared a common interest and enthusiasm for the demonstrations of physics and the measurements made in them. Concern about student’s measurement skills and some student’s long absence from school spawned an idea for using video material in teaching. Making measurements, using measuring instruments, and perceiving the accuracy of the measurement has been even more difficult for students nowadays. The situation is weakened by the reduction of demonstration lessons in school and practical measurement tasks in the student’s own circle of life. Therefore the importance of occasional absences has increased.
In the summer of 2018, we returned to school to shoot and implement measurement videos. That same autumn, we also set up our own company and commercialized the videos for other teachers. The number of functional tasks in teaching has increased steadily over the years, both through the requirements of curricula and the development of own teaching. More attention is paid to continuous work in classroom and its evaluation. Summative exams alone do not measure a student’s skills and activities in lessons well enough. Organizing functional tasks as one test task in an exam, alternating for different students, takes a lot of time and cannot always be organized. The student’s absence from the exam causes new arrangements and problems that we have been able to answer with the help of video assignments.
Our first version of the service worked from links attached to excel spreadsheets. As the number of assignments increased, we renewed our web-based service with the help of OAMK students. The change in the service responded to the growth in the number of users and the smoothness of operations, so that in the autumn of 2020 all our services began to operate on a web-based basis and the traffic did not load the users’ own servers. In order to develop the service, we cooperate with several different fields of education and look for a foothold for our operating model abroad.
Of the company’s founders, Tapio has been a teacher in mathematics, physics and chemistry at Kempele Primary School and Ylikylä School for most of his career. After studying physics, he worked as an assistant researcher in the Finnish Institute of Occupational Health in Oulu investigating clothing in cold weather and as a teacher in High School in Liminka for one academic year. An integral part of the work has also included shop stewardship as the chief shop steward of Kempele’s Akava for more than 20 years. In leisure time he has been active in sports working as a referee in winter games like bandy and rinkbandy and also as a member of a mens choir named Mieskuoro Huutajat.
Matti has been a teacher of mathematics and physics at Kempele Ylikylä Primary School since 2012. After studying the main subject of mathematics (in 2009), the jobs have been e.g. Ii Kuivaniemi Primary School, VR Track and Oulu Lyceum High School. Matti’s leisure activities include squash, tennis and padel.
