Physics (13) This project is developing a laboratory for electricity and magnetism. The laboratory is designed to provide a learning experience for each student that merges a physical concept having current research interest with a focus that makes the concept interesting and tractable. Visual Electricity and Magnetism is defined by a series of related experiments that lead to a clearly defined goal at the end of one semester. Communication, team work, and critical thinking are enhanced by the structured environment of cooperative learning groups. Each group consists of an experimentalist, a theorist, a referee, and an editor. After each student becomes acquainted with a laboratory experiment, the learning groups assemble. Each group collects data, analyzes the data, critiques the analysis, and prepares a summary of the day's accomplishments. Group assignments and assignments within a group are rotated periodically. This insures that each student has several opportunities to perform one of the well-defined tasks within the same group, and within other groups of different student composition. Courseware consisting of a Laboratory Workbook, LabVIEW (TM) software, and course related material is published by National Instruments on their web site. In addition to Web based publishing, National Instruments has the capability to distribute Visual Electricity and Magnetism on a compact disk.
