collaborative labs

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Phy 201

Your 'collaborative labs' report has been received. Scroll down through the document to see any comments I might have inserted, and my final comment at the end.

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Collaborative Labs

In that series you developed some important skills with teamwork, collaboration and communication. By now you have also developed additional lab techniques and insights, as well as an expanded understanding of physics and the standard formulations of motion, energy, momentum, forces and other topics.

You now have a good idea of the function of each member of the team, the designer, the experimenter, the analyzer and the interpreter.

You are also familiar with the items in your lab materials package.

The second series of activities will be spread out over the remainder of the semester. The investigations in this series will be more substantial and extensive than those of the first series, though we will limit the scope to keep the workload reasonable.

Please give a brief statement of three proposals for the second series of investigations.

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How much force would it take to stop a strap from rotating.

The amount of force to keep a pole from move while being pulled from different directions.

The energy of two objects colliding.

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Discuss your first idea. How do you think it might be tested? What sort of items do you think might be required? How do you think your idea might be tested?

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Hold the strap with one rubberband and attach another rubberband and see how much force it takes to get the strap to move.

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Discuss your second idea. How do you think it might be tested? What sort of items do you think might be required? How do you think your idea might be tested?

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Attach rubberbands to each side of the pole and see which rubber band has to apply more force.

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Discuss your third idea. How do you think it might be tested? What sort of items do you think might be required? How do you think your idea might be tested?

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Take two different sizes of objects, marbles for instance, see which marble will send the other farther and how much force the other takes to move the other one farther.

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Your instructor is trying to gauge the typical time spent by students on these activities. Please answer the following question as accurately as you can, understanding that your answer will be used only for the stated purpose and has no bearing on your grades:

Approximately how long did it take you to complete this activity?

40

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Thanks.

I had some interesting groups set up for the first set of collaborative labs, but some students are working at different paces, and some have dropped.

The last drop date is here, so very soon we'll address collaborative labs with groups of students who are committed to the course. We'll probably do only one set of collaborative labs, using suggestions from this document and the previous. There are already a number of good suggestion for the first collaborative lab, but now that everyone has done additional labs I want to give everyone a chance to express their ideas.

We have some excellent students in these courses and I think you'll enjoy working with your group.

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