Course Format and Philosophy
Design Challenge Labs
Physics 103 and 104 have transitioned from procedural lab that replicates experiements from a lab guidebook to a design based lab. In design based labs students will apply their physics knowledge, design and conduct a small experiment, and report outcomes based on their own data.
Our overall goal is to change the introductory physics labs in two ways: 1) Give students more independence in using physics principles to investigate phenomena; 2)Encourage students to act more like scientists and less like students doing a task for a grade.
Other lab approaches (e.g., ISLE labs at Illinois, Chico State, and Rutgers; and Scientific Community Labs at Maryland) have already taken steps in this direction. Other institutions use a mix of inquiry-based and traditional labs (UC Boulder). This is the directions we have moved toward.
The big principles
- Design Challenge: Every lab should have a design challenge—a task where the students need to make or modify something to solve a challenge, which will then be directly evaluated at the end of lab
- There should be 2+ ways to solve each challenge
- The challenge should use no more than 1-2 primary physics principles
- Communication: Students should have a chance to communicate their approach to their peers
- While they’re doing the design challenge, they are also creating a representation (pictorial, written, mathematical) of what they did on their whiteboard
- That whiteboard is used in a class-wide symposium, which allows them to make changes and share ideas before the evaluation at the end of lab.
Assessment
- Grading: Grading is based on the representation the students create.
- The representation serves to communicate their approach to their peers and to the TA
- Students take a photo of the whiteboard, upload it to Canvas, where the TA can use speed-grader to grade it
- We use a rubric (also provided to the students) to demonstrate our expectations. It’s likely that all students will get full points, making grading easier. The rubric from Canvas follows this section.
- Conceptual Scaffolding: Every task has some scaffolding built in (in the form of problems at the beginning of lab).
- This primes the students on which principles they should focus on
- These should be done at the beginning of lab, not as pre-labs (since they will lose the priming between then and the lab)
- Uncertainty Analysis: Uncertainty analysis is built directly into all of the labs
- It’s necessary to solve the design challenge
- It’s built into the grading rubric
- It’s explicitly built into the first lab
Lab Rubric
