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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:
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One person designs the entire experiment, one carries out the experimentation, one collects the data, and one interprets what that data means. You should have the chance to play each of these roles, in order to have the experience and understanding of them all.
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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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Measuring how far a toy car would roll off a ramp, at given distances up the ramp.
Measuring how quickly a balloon deflates, with given sizes.
How quickly does a laptop battery run out, with different programs running.
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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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Construct a little makeshift ramp, using a ruler mark off certain lengths on the ramp so you can release the car from certain distances. Then measure how far the car traveled from the end base of the ramp.
Materials needed: simple toy car, ruler, book or any flat surface to make a simple 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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With a balloon and a ruler, blow up the balloon to an initial size. Measure the diameter of the balloon as best you can, at the sides where it is the widest. Now using a timer, start the timer and let go of the balloon at the same time, stop the timer when the balloon is completely deflated. Relate the diameter and the time it required to deflate.
Materials needed: one balloon, ruler, stop watch, lung capacity
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it might be difficult to trigger the timer accurately, given that the balloon will probably deflate in a short time. Video with a timer running in the background could be run frame by frame to provide a fairly accurate measurement. Or allowing the air to escape through a narrow opening (say, a drinking straw) might lengthen the time to where it could be observed with some accuracy.
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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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This idea would take much more time. Fully charge the laptop, and open up the windows task manager to find how much memory the computer is using at the moment. Leave the laptop idle or run a few small programs, and allow the battery to run fully out, recording your starting and ending time. Then begin running more complex programs, things you know take up a lot of RAM to use, such as video games or virus scans or fullscreen movies, and repeat the experiment to see how much faster the battery runs out this time.
Materials needed: laptop, timer or clock that shows seconds, patience
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If you were to run a program in the background that writes the time to a file, say once a minute, you would just have to start the program when the computer is booted. You could then leave the computer overnight, or whatever, and on reboot after it has lost power the program would show you how long it lasted.
Since most computers run stuff in the background all the time, this could introduce some uncertainty into how hard it's working.
It would be hard to quantify how much CPU is being used.
Another option would be to run the experiment in a cool room then in a warm room to see if battery efficiency is affected by temperature.
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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 minutes
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Good. We'll come back to this in about a week, when I have everyone's suggestions.
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Check the notes I've inserted.
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