collaborative labs

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Phy 121

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.

** Collaborative Labs_labelMessages.txt **

I thought I had turned this in already.

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You will participate during the semester in two series of collaborative lab activities.

The first is designed to be relatively painless, and to begin to develop a degree of teamwork and collaboration.

These activities are designed for teams of four individuals, each with a specific function:

The designer will come up with the idea for the activity and will specify for other team members how the activity is to be conducted.

The experimenter will follow the designer's instructions to set up the experiment and collect data.

The analyzer will analyze the data.

The interpreter will describe what the results mean.

For each series of activities, you will participate in four different investigations, one as designer, another as experimenter, another as analyzer and another as interpreter.

As each investigation progresses, you will follow the work of your fellow team members.

Please summarize the above, as best you can, in your own words:

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I will be doing two collaborative lab activities during the span of this spring semester. In both of the lab activities I will be a designer (someone designing the lab), the experimenter (the one conducting the lab experiment), the analyzer (the one who will analyze the lab results and conduct it into words or numbers),

the interpreter (the one who will interpret what is going on during and after the lab activity.

As we go through our labs we will see the work of my other team members.

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The first series of activities will be spread out over the first half of the semester, the second series over the second half of the semester.

The first series will be based on systems you have seen in the Key Systems videos.

You will begin by describing at least three ideas for investigations related to the Key Systems videos.

Valid ideas will ultimately be developed proposals, each of which will describe a question that could be investigated and tested using simple materials

such as those seen in the videos. You will eventually develop three proposals, one of which will be chosen for an investigation.

You will be the designer for that investigation.

At this point we're just beginning to explore ideas for the first series of investigations. Your instructor will work with you to further develop your ideas,

and perhaps to explore other related possibilities.

Right now you don't have a wide variety of experimental techniques available to you, so this first series of investigations will be relatively simple.

List below three ideas for things you think might be fairly easy to test, based on the systems you have seen so far.

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I believe the easiest experiments would be the pendulum, rotational motion, and the marble from rest down incline then to table.

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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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For a pendulum experiment, one can easily get a 2x4 piece of wood and hammer in a nail near the edge of the piece. Then have a string tied to it and have a washer for the weight at the bottom. I would

have this piece of wood nailed to the wall so the pendulum would have a good swing to it because if it was inclined the pendulum would be swinging into the board.

M

aterials: hammer, 2x nail, 2x4 piece of wood, string and washer.

Then setting it up to test the pendulum motion.

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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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For the rotational motion experiement, I think it would be beneficial to get a sheet of wood from a store and obtaining a screw, washer, and a nut. By using the strap of metal we get in our material package with the screw, washer and nut we can get a better

rotational motion to it rather than having it on top of a domino, because the domino moves and sometimes the metal strap will fall off. With having the metal strip between the nut and washer we can have the strap more in a secure position so it will not fall off.

Materials: Sheet of wood, screw, washer, nut, and metal strap.

For best it would be used on the floor.

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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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For the marble declining onto a table, we can easily use a few books for an elevated platform. We can use the marbles that are given in the package and the dominoes to elavate the ramp to whatever degree we would like so we can see how the degree of inclination effects the speed or distance of the marble.

Materials: standard hanging rack, marble, books, dominoes, paper (to mark where it landed)

My idea is to test the speed of the marble and the distance of in which the marble travels once it lands on the piece of paper, because of the inclined hanging rack.

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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?

20 minutes

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These are good ideas.

Unfortunately you've missed the first round of collaborative labs, but you'll get the chance to make it up soon, when the second round starts.

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