How we shrank a university materials-mechanics lab into a home kit

This project was a real milestone for us. It began with a polite message and grew into something close to unprecedented. Now that it's done, it's worth setting down properly.

It started with our STEAM teacher-certification course, run in partnership with National Cheng Kung University (NCKU). On the first day, a university email address turned up on the sign-up list — a professor from the civil-engineering department. He had none of the aloofness we'd come to expect from senior academics; he'd enrolled purely for the sake of his own two children. Someone else pouring himself into education. In that moment, we understood the weight of our own course a little more deeply.

We went on to run a two-day mechanics of materials project camp for high-schoolers. That whole series of high-school courses exists to fill a gap: to give teenagers two days to go deep into a professional field, walk through one complete project with their own hands, and find out whether they actually relish the challenge that field poses. To design it, we spent a long time with the professor understanding how the department recruits and what problems students run into once they arrive — then calibrated the two days carefully. Not so simple it feels like make-believe; not so hard it scares people off. It worked: the department received a wave of applications from students who genuinely loved the field. A win for everyone.

And it was precisely that success that led to the bigger, deeper project that followed.

That March, the professor sent a short message. He wanted to help the university promote an online lab course, with simple kits students could operate at home to go alongside it, and he hoped to draw on our hands-on experience for advice on the equipment. We had no idea that "some advice" would snowball into an enormous undertaking.

The university's original audience was undergraduates only. But the subject we were about to film — mechanics of materials — overlaps considerably with high-school mechanics, with earthquakes in earth science, and with seismic resistance in the life-science curriculum, and none of it is especially hard. So we suggested the professor widen the audience all the way down to high school: clear, accessible explanations of the principles, demonstration videos, and our home kits alongside. With that, teachers and curious students alike could learn it almost on their own — and teachers could extend it into inquiry-and-practice units, flexible-learning time, and science-fair work, bridging the gap in professional content that sits between university and high school.

On the surface it looked simple: shoot some videos, build some kits. But the moment you take outreach seriously, every part has to be done more finely. So there are three parts to talk about: the filming, the kit development, and the promotion.

Filming: shot at the highest spec we could manage

Before this project, we'd already filmed the first- and second-tier versions of the NCKU certification course, and we'd come away a little dissatisfied — dissatisfied enough to resolve that this time we'd shoot at the highest standard we were capable of.

The first rule: 4K — and not the kind a phone shoots. We rented a professional 4K camera from a specialist equipment house, with a matching professional tripod (eight to ten kilograms for a single leg-set), two cameras rolling, three lights. A day's equipment rental came to around NT$7,000. Add audio good enough to make your ears melt, plus — so we could review footage on the spot — a 27-inch iMac hauled to the location and a 55-inch 4K monitor for checking detail in real time. And all of that is really just the baseline any professional shoot runs.

Where we spent the real thought was how to film an explanation of the principles. After studying a lot of professional teaching videos, we reached one conclusion: the closer the shot feels to a real classroom, the longer a student's attention holds.

Search for online principle-explainer videos and you'll mostly see two approaches:

1. Slides front and centre, with the instructor's head off to the side. Clean and tidy, but the instructor can barely write anything by hand — and writing with a mouse is slow and ugly, so students drift off.
2. A straight recording of a real class. The least effort, but the frame has to hold the board, the screen, and the teacher all at once, so the writing is often illegible or the teacher too small; and because the room's lights go on and off for the projector, either the slides are washed out or the frame is dim enough to send you to sleep. Students drift off again.

In our experience, letting students watch the teacher's mouth and expression, paired with a hand moving as it writes, best creates the sense of really being in class. To pull that off, we went with a large TV plus handwriting on an iPad: the whole slide becomes the teacher's backdrop (even the slide layouts were rebuilt to fit where the teacher sits in the frame), with the teacher's proportion in the shot carefully tuned. We ended up using a 75-inch 4K TV, the largest iPad Pro, and an Apple Pencil. None of those three could be rented or borrowed — we had to buy them. But when the edit came together and the result looked this good, it was pure relief.

Filming took about eight days. Editing the thirty-three videos took a solid month (and a fair amount more spent on hardware upgrades). The workflow ran roughly like this:

• Organising the raw footage — audio and video were recorded separately, with several takes on location, so we first had to match up the files and decide which version to cut.
• Making proxy files — the raw footage was all 4K, and the computers of the day couldn't handle it, so we had to cut from a lower-resolution proxy first and return to full quality on export.
• Denoising and cleaning the audio — sound quality is the single biggest factor in whether a video is watchable. Even the best microphone picks up low-frequency room noise (the air-con, for one); a basic denoise and a touch of warmth on the voice makes it feel like the teacher is speaking right beside you.
• A rough cut — simply trimming the heads and tails, ready for subtitling.
• AI subtitles — export the audio, run it through a subtitling tool built for Chinese, and get back an SRT file.
• Subtitle correction — the most punishing stage. This is a professional lesson dense with technical terms, and even with the AI saving us the work of syncing to the timeline, a thirty-minute video still took around three hours to correct — line by line, adjusting the breaks so a student can read each one quickly and correctly.
• Adding explanatory animation and cutting in real footage — to make the content more intuitive, we built callout animations and even shot additional real experiment footage, including a near-one-to-one giant shake-table test conducted at the national earthquake-engineering research centre.
• Output check, another pass, final export — with a video this specialised, no amount of checking the subtitles and content is too much.

The kit: turning six-figure equipment into a few dollars' worth

Once you call something a home experiment, price, shipping, consumables, safety, and stability all have to be designed in.

Our development method was simple: the professor named the function he wanted, or handed us the actual instrument they used, and we found a way — with substitute materials — to build a low-cost, shrunken version that did something similar.

But university equipment, especially in civil engineering, is mostly heavy machinery: six figures apiece as a starting point. A professional shake table, at national-grade spec, runs to eight. And to promote this widely, we had to keep each item at a few hundred NT dollars. A price gap of hundreds to one, and yet near-identical function — that is genuinely hard.

The kit began as just two big parts: basic mechanics of materials (tension, compression, shear, torsion, axial deformation) and one small shake table. Later we added scaled buildings and dampers, rounding out the earthquake-resistant, base-isolation, and vibration-damping content.

The mechanical design itself wasn't the hard part. The hard part was the material — something cheap, able to deform, and able to spring back instantly. That alone had us stuck for a month. We eventually landed on EPE foam (the cushioning packaging common in tech factories), but between thicknesses, diameters, and hardnesses — solid cylinders, hollow ones, flat ones, square ones — we bought and tested close to thirty different samples.

And the shake table? Don't assume it just wobbles back and forth. The easy route is an off-the-shelf reciprocating mechanism, but that pushes the cost over NT$10,000, well past our target for outreach. So we redesigned the mechanism and picked our own motor to arrive at the finished unit — which can even take an external frequency sensor to display the current vibration frequency, accurate to three decimal places.

All that back-and-forth, plus structural tweaks for easy assembly, across a dozen or so kits, took us about four months — and filled a summer that the pandemic was supposed to have left empty.

Outreach: a good thing no one knows about might as well not exist

This part is the one most education projects skip. In our experience, it's the one that matters most.

A good thing that no one knows about might as well never have been made. We needed the people who genuinely need this resource to know it exists.

We already had beautiful course footage and finely made kits, so we had to photograph them well. Photography has always been our weak spot, but we've always known that one good photo says more than a thousand words — it catches the eye faster and makes people willing to stop and hear us out. So we threw in title design, brand photography, product shots, a product manual, and high-school lesson plans on top — the whole set, so the course could make its entrance looking its best at any moment.

At that year's Taiwan Science Festival, even tucked in the back corner, we drew plenty of people who stopped to listen, gave warm feedback, and even brought follow-on collaborations. And because the product was so complete, cross-brand partnerships came together easily: we teamed up with the German brand Hape to extend the lesson down to a version young children could run — after a short lesson on structures, a child builds a sturdy tower on the spot, sets snacks on top of the shake table, and if it survives a full minute without anything falling, the snacks are theirs to keep.

The most interesting part: the question the general public asked us most at the expo was which is better — earthquake-resistant, damped, or base-isolated construction — and whether RC or SRC is cheaper. Clearly there's a lot more room to work with there.

Teaching and marketing are actually alike: you find the need first, and only then can you supply what people genuinely want. The same thing, told to a different audience, calls for a different way in.

That's a lot said, and there's still plenty left unsaid. Over those months, more than once we marvelled that we'd managed to take it this far. But it's precisely because we hold teaching, development, and marketing experience all at once that we can build kits that truly fit the realities of a classroom — and know what kind of video meets a student's needs, what kind of product meets a market's, and how to promote it for the greatest effect.

Having run the whole thing end to end, we're all the more certain: bringing a university lab into the home is worth carrying on.