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

  1. 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
  2. There should be 2+ ways to solve each challenge
  3. The challenge should use no more than 1-2 primary physics principles
  4. Communication: Students should have a chance to communicate their approach to their peers
  5. While they’re doing the design challenge, they are also creating a representation (pictorial, written, mathematical) of what they did on their whiteboard
  6. 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

  1. Grading: Grading is based on the representation the students create.
  2. The representation serves to communicate their approach to their peers and to the TA
  3. Students take a photo of the whiteboard, upload it to Canvas, where the TA can use speed-grader to grade it
  4. 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.
  5. Conceptual Scaffolding: Every task has some scaffolding built in (in the form of problems at the beginning of lab).
    1. This primes the students on which principles they should focus on
    2. These should be done at the beginning of lab, not as pre-labs (since they will lose the priming between then and the lab)
  6. Uncertainty Analysis: Uncertainty analysis is built directly into all of the labs
    1. It’s necessary to solve the design challenge
    2. It’s built into the grading rubric
    3. It’s explicitly built into the first lab

Lab Rubric

Lab Rubric for design labs

License

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Physics 103 and 104 Teaching Guide Copyright © by © 2018 Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System. is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted.