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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 hope these ideas are good ones. We tried to think of good experimental ideas and hopefully they are good ones to test.
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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:
****During this semester we will have two series of collaborative lab activities. In order to do these, you need three other people to help you with the lab. One to design the experiment, one to set up the experiment as the designer has explained, one to analyze data in the experiment, and one to interpret what the data/information means.
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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.
****Steel ball traveling down ramp (included in the materials package). Increasing the height of one end of the ramp by one domino per run.
Holding a pendulum (a string with washer) just close enough to the pendulum counting how many cycles it will run before it gets pulled by the magnet.
Using the domino effect (with the dominoes provided in the materials package) to calculate velocity or possibly momentum.
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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?
****The first idea is taking the larger steel ball that came in the materials package and placing on top of the ramp and releasing it to find the velocity and any other material desired that can be found with just that information. The ramp will have a domino under it and after each recorded run, there will be one more domino added to the others. The designer has come up with this, the experimenter will set it up as described by the designer, the analyzer will record any relevant data in this experiment, like the clock times, the distance, the number of dominos under the one end of the ramp, etc., and the interpreter will conclude what every aspect means.
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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?
****I am not sure if we will experiment with magnets in this semester or at all in physics, but I thought this would be an interesting experiment. Holding a pendulum (the washer attached to the string) you could test to see how magnets, being strategically place near the metal pendulum, pull the pendulum and affect its course.
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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?
****There were several dominos given in the materials package and I thought one could use those dominoes to calculate a velocity or possible a transfer of momentum (don't know if we will get to that in this course). We could set up a number of dominoes and start the initial domino to hit the rest and see how long it took, etc. I don't know if that is a good or testable idea, but I thought it would be interesting.
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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?
45 minutes
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Very good ideas. Thanks.
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