Your first in-person meeting will occur during Week 3, but you will complete an at-home assignment during Week 2. Full details on how the course will run are below, but in short the format is as follows:

• There will be 6 in-person lab sessions (Weeks 3-8) plus the introductory at-home assignment (Week 2). Each session will be treated as an independent experiment, and all sessions carry equal weight.
• Each lab session will be 2 hours and 50 minutes and students are expected to attend for the full time.
• Students will work in groups of 3 and will collaborate on a digital group lab notebook. This notebook will be due at the end of each session. Students are graded individually on participation during the session and as a group on the completeness of the lab notebook.
• After the conclusion of each lab, each student will submit an individual short Post-Lab Assignment in which you may summarize work, answer specific questions, or draw conclusions about the experiment you just finished. This is due 48 hours before the next lab, and the TA will give the report a quality grade.

Our goal with this lab sequence is for you to gain practice doing experimental physics. While you will see many of the phenomena discussed in lecture show up in these labs, the point is not just to repeat that content but to use that content to explore and learn the scientific process. Put succinctly, the goal is to understand how we know, not what we know.

Your first in-person lab meeting will occur during Week 3. You should receive information about your lab room and TA assignment during Week 2.

In the meantime, you have an important preparatory assignment (Introduction to Experimental Physics) to complete before the end of Week 2. When you are finished, upload your assignment to Canvas by Friday, October 7 at 5:30 pm CDT to receive credit.

Links to experiments will go live at the start of the quarter.

When you registered for the course, you were placed into a 2 hour and 50 minute lab section by the Registrar.

• The section assigned by the Registrar is the lab section you should attend and no further action is required.
• If this lab section no longer works with your schedule, you will need to contact Tiffany Kurns (tkurns@uchicago.edu) to switch into a different lab section.
• All PHYS 121 labs take place in KPTC 116.
• PHYS 131 labs take place in either KPTC 107 or 109 (check the signage on the door to determine which room your section is in).

It is essential that you are in an appropriate lab section by Friday of Week 2. Contact Tiffany Kurns (tkurns@uchicago.edu) with all lab section scheduling requests.

If you miss a lab (due to sickness or emergency), please contact both your lab TA and Tiffany Kurns (tkurns@uchicago.edu) as soon as possible. Tiffany will work with you to find a different lab section to attend later in the week (if one is available and you are able). If you are unable to attend an alternate section during the same week as your absence, you will need to attend the make-up lab offered during ninth week.

If you miss more than one lab during the quarter, you must speak with your lecture professor to discuss options.

For the introductory physics laboratories here at the University of Chicago, we have adopted a set of learning objectives. By the end of this course, you should be able to do the following:

• collect data and revise an experimental procedure iteratively and reflectively;
• evaluate the process and outcomes of an experiment quantitatively and qualitatively;
• extend the scope of an investigation whether or not results come out as expected;
• communicate the process and outcomes of an experiment; and
• conduct an experiment collaboratively and ethically.

Put succinctly, the goal is to understand how we know, not what we know.*

Each lab you work on this year will relate back to one or more of these course objectives and will help you develop and apply the tools of experimental physics. The aim is to teach critical thinking through experimentation, and for you to see how the concepts of lecture are applied (and limited by) specific physical situations.

• Each session lasts 2 hours and 50 minutes, and you are expected to arrive on-time and stay for the entire period.
  • Your lab section was assigned by the Registrar when you scheduled. If that time no longer works for you, you must contact Tiffany Kurns (tkurns@uchicago.edu) before the end of Week 2 to be rescheduled into an appropriate section.
• In lab, you will work in groups of three students.
  • Your group will record observations, data, photos, and calculations in an electronic lab notebook. This notebook will be useful in discussions with your TA and for drawing conclusions at the end of project, but it is a working document that is not expected to be perfect, polished or even correct.
  • You will submit a copy of this notebook via Canvas before the end of the lab period. Your TA will grade the notebook for completeness only; you will not be graded on data, conclusions, notes, or anything else related to “correctness”.
• Once the experiment is over, you will turn in a short individual post-lab assignment that is specific to that experiment. The assignment may ask you to provide a summary of the experiment (only the most important information), to answer specific questions about the experiment (or related work), or to draw conclusions about your work. 
  • This assignment will be graded on quality and correctness. (Not on the correctness of your results/answers, but on the correctness of your reasoning and conclusions.)
  • Each lab will outline what you should include, and you should talk to your TA if you have questions (especially in the first few labs as you are just getting started). 
• Points will be assigned for different parts of the project based on participation, your group notebook, and the quality of your submitted post-lab assignment.

The rubric for the every project this quarter is identical and is shown below. Your grade is based both on participation (e.g. your completed lab notebook and participation in group meetings), and on the quality of your final report (e.g. your summary and your conclusions). The total maximum score is 8 points for a one-week project.