I'm not sure what the purpose of that was. Clearly, you CAN light a small bulb with a battery and wire, as done in the video and introductory physics classes everywhere. So... is it the fact that the students were unable to figure out that the battery produced insufficient power to light the big bulb? That shows a lack of "fundamental understanding about electricity"? More like a lack of knowledge about power requirements of household light bulbs.

One core message of the video is that when lacking fundamental knowledge, that no matter how 'advanced' your knowledge is, certain processes are beyond your true understanding.

So jumping into an advanced topic is good, but you really need to apply rigor to ensure you understand the important fundamentals. Obviously trying to understand everything possible can be inefficient or even unnecessary.

All the same its worth considering.

Most of them weren't making a circuit -- just running the wire from one end of the battery to the base of the bulb. That shows a very fundamental lack of understanding of what's going on, without even getting into things like the power requirements of the bulb.

I'm not sure they lack such understanding. Isn't this what psychologists call cognitive bias, or something like that? I believe there was a thread here on HK about it, a study showing that people often do irrational things because they assume they know everything. You know? People just think "geez, that is easy..." and rush to answear the first thing that comes to mind, just to discover that they missed the details and feel really stupid :P

Ah, ok, that makes more sense. I guess I assumed that they only showed the students holding the items after trying, not their actual effort. Now I'm a bit depressed.

I think the 'problem' was that you need two wires to close the circuit.

It's easier to hold one of the contacts of the battery directly on the bulb and one end of a single wire on the bottom of the battery, all with one hand, then use another hand to touch the wire to the other contact on the light bulb. The problem is they didn't intuitively understand bigger light bulbs when operated on lower voltage (and thus lower current).

The funny physics answer would be to assemble correctly and then point out that it's lit, just exceedingly dimly (producing mainly IR).