EDUCATION:

Hands-On at Home

Every semester, roughly 200 students from across the university roll up their sleeves for experimental physics. The course serves not only as the introductory lab course for physics majors but fulfills a general education lab requirement for many students.

When Associate Teaching Professor David Anderson was tasked with moving the course online amid the coronavirus pandemic, his first thought was “how on earth are we going to do this?”

“Sometimes you get so involved in the minutiae of the course that you can’t see the wood for the trees,” Anderson said.

He had to step back and think about not only the learning objectives of the course but also how to adapt those objectives to these new and unprecedented circumstances. A large part of the course focuses on learning on how to analyze data and draw conclusions from experiments, something that was relatively easy to adjust to at-home instruction.

Anderson began by reworking some of the current experiments in the lab. In one experiment, students would normally use a spectroscope to measure the light emitted from hydrogen. To adapt for online instruction, Anderson took pictures of what students would have seen through the device. While they don’t get to use the device themselves, they can use the photos to learn how to make the right measurements and analyze the data they collect.

But Anderson admits that to truly meet the goals of the course, students do need some kind of hands-on work.

“With hands-on work, there’s no substitute for doing the experiment yourself — learning how to get a good sense of all of the potential issues and errors that can arise when you do an experiment and how you might go about controlling for those,” Anderson said. Experimental work also teaches students how to document their work by writing procedures, testing hypotheses and analyzing and communicating their results.

Thus, he created new experiments to capture the hands-on elements of the course where students could learn how to set up, conduct, analyze and report a scientifically rigorous experiment.

Running in the footsteps of Galileo, Anderson tasked students with analyzing the motion of objects falling over different distances to determine a precise value for acceleration due to gravity. Using their cell phone’s video camera, students can record the falling object in slow motion and go through the video’s time index to accurately measure its motion.

“Five or 10 years ago, we wouldn’t have been able to do this with any precision from home,” Anderson said.
With a little ingenuity and modern technology, “you can do high-precision experiments that meet all the goals of the course — the documentation, the rigorous analysis, the deciding if you’re prediction agrees with the theoretical model,” said Anderson.

Whether in person or online, Anderson believes the beauty of the course is learning how to design and carry out a scientifically sound experiment and examine all the elements that come with that, such as understanding experimental uncertainty, statistical significance and data analysis.

“I think we were able to transition the course online because the focus of doing these experiments is not on learning how to use the particular equipment. The course is really focused on the broader concept of the experiment itself,” said Anderson.

When all is said and done, his goal is to equip students with the analytical and practical tools to become adept scientific researchers regardless of what the experiments are or what equipment is used.