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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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:

There will be two series of collaborative lab activities during this semester that involves teams of four people. For each of these labs, we will participate in four different investigations such as designer, experimenter, analyzer, and interpreter. We will follow the work of our fellow 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.

Measuring the force of gravity of a falling object.

Measuring flow rate of a fluid at different angles

Measuring how force effects acceleration of a moving object according to Netwons second law of motion 

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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?

Drop different objects of various weights and perform the appropriate calculations. Not very sure on how to do this yet. 

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If an object falls very far air resistance becomes a factor; it if doesn't fall very far the time interval is short and difficult to measure without a large percent error. However it is possible with simple apparatus to put upper and lower limits on the acceleration of gravity. So this could be a viable activity.

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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?

Fill a 2-liter bottle of water, and using the TIMER make measurements of the fluid flowing from the bottle at different angles.

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There are many possibilities for angles in this situation. To which angles might you be referring?

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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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Your lab materials package will contain a hot-wheels car. This is definitely a possibility.

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Use a matchbox car or some other object calculate the force applied and the acceleration. These are just some ideas to start out with that could be developed further as we get into each related chapter. 

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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?

30 mins.

 

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Thanks. Check my notes.

I'll soon be assigning groups and selecting activities from among those suggested. Expect me to get back to you on this sometime next week.

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