Semesters taught: Spring 2018, Spring 2019, Spring 2020
General course information:
Spring 2020 Syllabus
Lab Syllabus
Blackboard communications during the Spring 2020 transition to online teaching
New problem sets with 3-level difficulty
Selected course materials:
Math skills assessment guide and solutions
Comprehensive notes on uncertainty analysis for labs
Problem solving flow-chart
Problem solving questions
New inquiry-based labs:
Following on the advice of Professor Grace Holmes (Cornell University), a researcher in the area of physics education with an emphasis on improving the quality and effectiveness of labs, I redesigned our PHY 201 labs so that most of them take place over a 2 week period to give students opportunities for revision of there experiments and refinement of their analysis. The following notes and guides are the product of this work.
Lab rubric and examples of good/bad technical writing
Example of an ideal lab writeup
Additional instructions for the labs are given in class, in a discussion and presented on the board. The following notes are provided to students following the lab to help guide them in their writing of the reports. They are allowed and encouraged to copy verbatim all text in black (we often learn by mimicry, after all). All text in red are instructions for areas that they must complete themselves. The idea here is that the labs put progressively more onus on the students for construction of the full report.
Lab 1 notes: Geometric inference of pi
Lab 2 notes: Emergency landing
Lab 3 notes: Asteroid interception
Lab 4 notes: Casino equilibria
Lab 5 notes: Calculation of the landing zone for a cannonball
Lab 6 notes: Friction in granular materials
Lab 7 notes: Meteor impact
Supplementary content created to conduct labs under distance learning (Spring 2020)
Note: these are large zip files. Contained within are images and videos that the students used to analyze the labs from afar.
Examples of student work:
Lab #4 report
Lab #5 report