collaborative labs

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Phy 202

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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We will be conducting 2 investigations over the semester, each with four separate roles. The investigations will be done using teamwork with one person per 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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1. Compare how far an object will roll based on increasing weight. (Like water in a bottle) (distance)

2. Compare how fast an object will roll based on incline change.

3. Compare how long an object will roll based on weight (same as idea #1 but based on time)

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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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With the first idea, you could take a plastic soda bottle and put 3 marks on it. Filling it up to the first mark, you could roll it down an incline and see how far it goes. You could do the same for the remaining two marks on the bottle and see how the difference in weight affects the distance rolled.

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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 this idea, you could use something round like a marble or bouncy ball, and roll it down an incline such as a book. You could have a mark somewhere across from the book and use that as the point for stopping the timer and recording the time, based on changing the book incline.

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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 is the same as the first, except the testing objective being time rather than distance. Fill the bottle to different marked amounts, and test whether it moves faster or slower with more or less water, and see if that corresponds to the distance travelled.

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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?

½ hour

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Good ideas. We will follow up on this very soon.

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