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.

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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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 Four individuals will engage in a collaborative lab, with each person fulfilling a specific role. Each person will have a change to participate in each role.

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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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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?

****An expierment could be testing the friction of two different surfaces by repeating the expierment that involved rolling an object down a ramp, using two differnt materials two make two ramps and comparing times to figure out relative friction of each ramp.

 

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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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 An experiment could be doing a more extensive test on the pendulum experiment, changing more variables, such as the mass of the object at the end.

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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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 An experiment could be done with a ball and a half pipe shaped ramp. The experiment could measure energy expenditures of the ball as it rolled back and forth and how much energy was leaving the system through friction, heat...etc.

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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?

 

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Copy your document into the box below, be sure you have filled in your name and other identifying information at the top of this form, and submit:

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I really like all of these ideas.

Once I've heard from all up-to-date students, which should be within about a week, I'll select an idea from each participant and assign groups. I'll provide more guidance at that time.

Thanks.

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