No stupidity -- if you break anything, you replace it.
You must attend the lab section for which you are registered.
Pre-labs/Reading Quizes are due before you enter the room -- no extensions.
If you do not complete the Prelab/Reading Quiz you will not be permitted to perform the lab.
No one is admitted to the lab room 10 minutes after the Co-op session begins.
Each student must have his/her own Laptop with the Chrome Browser installed.
Lab reports are to be submitted in Canvas. The jupyter notebooks are due at 11:59 pm the day of the lab.
Anyone caught plagiarizing work in the laboratory notebook, from a
current or past student's notebook, will receive an F in the course
and will be reported to the University Honor Council.
Labs will be graded on a scale from 0 to 5 as follows:
5 = Complete and excellent work
4 = Satisfactory, but with some minor errors
3 = Significant errors or omissions
2 = Very little correct or useful work
1 = Lab report submitted, but with minimal work
0 = Missed lab
Every lab report includes:
The names of all the people in your lab group
Your group number.
An abstract
This is a brief summary of the experiment about to be performed. You
should explain what data you will gather, the procedure for gathering
the data, and the reason for gathering the data. You can (and should)
write this ahead of time. The abstract is very specific. You may
want to write the abstract before coming to lab.
The data
recorded during the lab with units and error estimates,
arranged neatly.
Error analysis
In this section, you will identify the source of the error and
state the effect of the error on the analysis and the conclusion.
Was the error random (statistical) or systematic? Was it caused
by the equipment or by the use of the equipment? Propagate the
errors in your data to any quantities calculated from your data.
A conclusion
This is a brief answer to the following question: "What did I learn
from the experiment, from my data, and from my analysis?"
You will not be required to prove the theory, in fact you
must not even try to prove the theory. If the data that you collected
and the subsequent error analysis do not support the physical theory,
do not force it. The conclusion is very general.
Students will partner-up according to their co-op group for each experiment.
When writing a lab report, it will be helpful to imagine as your audience
(1) another student with a Physics background who has not taken the lab
but who wants to understand what you have done and (2) yourself ten years
from now -- you should be able to reconstruct the lab from your own report.
Include sufficient detail so that you will know why you did things and
how you did them.
The laboratory manuals are NOT meant to be stand-alone documents;
students are expected to use a text book for supplementary reading.
Often a topic in Physics will be encountered first in the laboratory,
and only later will the theory be explained in the lecture.
When creating a graph use a spreadsheet or the graphing code included in the jupyter notebook.
NEVER play connect-the-dots with data points; it is never
correct to plot straight lines between gathered data points. It does
make sense to plot a best-fit curve if you know the functional
form for the data. For example, if you expect on theoretical grounds
that the data should lie along a straight line, you can fit the best
possible straight line through your data points.
Axes should be labeled, and the units should be given. For example,
a plot of velocity(m/s) versus time(seconds).
The final practicum is held in the lab room during the usual lab meeting
time.
You must attend the section for which you are registered.
You have the entire three-hour period, although it should not take
this long.
It is open-book, open note, open internet.
You may print hard copies of anything and bring
them to the final practicum.
Bring a hand-held calculator and your laptop to the final practicum.
In addition to the written questions, there
will also be a short experiment which you perform individually.