Eight year experience in open ended instrumentation laboratory

dc.contributor.author Manuel Joaquim Marques en
dc.contributor.author Carla Carmelo Rosa en
dc.contributor.author Paulo Vicente Marques en
dc.date.accessioned 2018-01-17T09:44:23Z
dc.date.available 2018-01-17T09:44:23Z
dc.date.issued 2015 en
dc.description.abstract When designing laboratory courses in a Physics Major we consider a range of objectives: teaching Physics; developing lab competencies; instrument control and data acquisition; learning about measurement errors and error propagation; an introduction to project management; team work skills and scientific writing. But nowadays we face pressure to decrease laboratory hours due to the cost involved. Many universities are replacing lab classes for simulation activities, hiring PhD. and master students to give first year lab classes, and reducing lab hours. This leads to formatted lab scripts and poor autonomy of the students, and failure to enhance creativity and autonomy. In this paper we present our eight year experience with a laboratory course that is mandatory in the third year of Physics and Physical Engineering degrees. Since the students had previously two standard laboratory courses, we focused on teaching instrumentation and giving students autonomy. The course is divided in two parts: one third is dedicated to learn computer controlled instrumentation and data acquisition (based in LabView); the final 2/3 is dedicated to a group project. In this project, the team (2 or 3 students) must develop a project and present it in a typical conference format at the end of the semester. The project assignments are usually not very detailed (about two or three lines long), giving only general guidelines pointing to a successful project (students often recycle objectives putting forward a very personal project); all of them require assembling some hardware. Due to our background, about one third of the projects are related to Optics. en
dc.identifier.uri http://repositorio.inesctec.pt/handle/123456789/6558
dc.identifier.uri http://dx.doi.org/10.1117/12.2223201 en
dc.language eng en
dc.relation 4383 en
dc.relation 4318 en
dc.relation 4287 en
dc.rights info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess en
dc.title Eight year experience in open ended instrumentation laboratory en
dc.type conferenceObject en
dc.type Publication en
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