Easy Light Board

During the pandemic, teachers have often been abruptly moved online. Keeping students engaged and interested is what teachers love to do, and that can be tough when you're online and at home with limited resources. Here's a way of quickly and easily making a very accessible DIY lightboard that requires no construction skills beyond the use of tape and clamps, and is very easy to store compactly. To record yourself in action, you'll also need a tripod and a phone. I found the lightboard to be great for producing compelling problem-solving clips or quick tutorials, because as an instructor you're much more "there" in the recording than you are as a disembodied voiceover.

You need an LED strip, some tape, a 24 × 36" sheet of acrylic and some one-handed clamps. While acrylic (= Perspex) can be expensive new (prices have soared during the pandemic), an enormous amount has been produced for barriers, and so you may be able to pick some up used for cheaper. The exact size is not critical, though it does need to be wider than a doorway. My offcut was roughly 500 × 850 mm (20 × 33").

To draw on the board, you will need some neon-colored whiteboard markers. To record yourself in action, you'll need a tripod and a phone or camera.

Tape the LED strip around the outside of your acrylic sheet. No sense in cutting the strip, you might want to use it for something else later (e.g. this cool illuminated house number sign!). These extra lights will act as a ring light to illuminate your face and hand while you present. Clamp the contraption in a handy doorway using 4 one-handed clamps (these are *super* useful, if you don't own any you'll find lots of other uses for them). Plug in the LED light strip and select the white (or warm white) mode. Loop the excess LED strip around the light board. You're ready to go!

One problem you may experience is that the LED strip may be wider than the acrylic, so when you try to clamp it to the wall it will try to push the strip off. You can fix this issue just by taping a few layers of cardboard to the corners where you're clamping.

Note that I used a waterproof LED strip, because that is what I had handy, but I think it is worth paying the little bit extra for this anyway because the waterproofing also protects the strip from wear and tear.

You should use the light board either at night or when your rooms are well darkened. Set up your phone on a tripod with the light board neatly centered and with no tape showing. Start the video, duck underneath the light board, and begin your lesson. When you're starting out, ask someone to help with set up - getting the tripod placed perfectly and the panel height right and the brightness correct and the background dark can take some tweaking the first time. Top tip: set the autofocus and autoexposure while the lights are still ON (tap and hold for a few seconds on the screen until a yellow box that says AE/AF LOCK appears, see third photo). That will force the phone to stop trying to compensate for low light levels, which is important because otherwise you will see every tiny imperfection on the light board surface.

Disclaimer: I've only done this on an iPhone, but I'm sure other devices have equivalent functions. Editing is simple:

1. Trim the video to the correct start and finish times.
2. Edit to increase contrast (this will deemphasize the background and make the writing pop).
3. Mirror the video.
4. You may have an issue with audio volume, because you're on the other side of the sheet from the phone, and so you might be quite quiet. I solved this using the volume control slider in iMovie (free for iPhone), which allows you to boost the audio up to 500%.

You can also crop the video, sometimes useful if you didn't quite align the camera correctly.

Here's an example of me demonstrating how to draw various polyhedra for a chemistry class.

I appreciate this is not the fanciest lightboard you've ever seen, but it is very straightforward to make, the door frame + clamps hold it really securely, it's easy to store, and all of the parts (except the tape) can be repurposed once you're done.