This project is developing a new type of undergraduate laboratory course at Caltech called the Physics Design Lab. The course is patterned after the highly successful Engineering Design Lab courses that exist throughout the country.
In the Physics Design Lab, undergraduate students are asked to design, build, and debug their own physics experiments in a professional laboratory setting, much as their engineering counterparts are asked to design and build electro-mechanical devices in the Engineering Design Labs. Resources and equipment are available to allow the students to "ask their own questions" and "design their own experiments" in tracks related to Dynamical Ion Trapping, Dynamical Magnetic Trapping, Quantized Conductance, The Josephson Effect, and Optical Tweezers, or students can design and build a Magnetoelectrodynamic Coin Shrinker demonstration. Each track presents interesting physics while still being fun to build and simple enough to enable less experienced students to be successful.
The overarching goal of the Physics Design Lab is to allow students to become "practicing physicists" by giving them the opportunity to design their first experiment and to build their first simple piece of apparatus, while enabling them to learn basic experimental techniques through hands-on experience.
The primary objective of this NSF grant was to develop a new type of undergraduate laboratory course at Caltech that we call the Physics Design-and-Build Lab, in which students design, build, and debug their own physics experiments in a professional laboratory setting. In addition to teaching essential laboratory skills, a broader goal for the Physics Design-and-Build Lab was to create a different kind of laboratory experience that better fosters an imaginative and inventive spirit in our students. Our longer-term goal is to lead the way toward the development of similar courses at other colleges. This grant began in October 2010, and we ran the Design-and-Build Lab for the academic years 2010-11, 2011-12, and 2012-13 as an optional component of the Advanced Physics Laboratory course at Caltech. We converted about a third of our total laboratory space (roughly 410 square feet) into the Design-and-Build Lab (see Figure). Several lab benches were set up for experiments, and students worked in this space on their projects. The course focuses on teaching techniques in experimental physics through hands-on experience, and giving students a better understanding of how to create and fabricate hardware on their own. During the three years of this grant, students in the Design-and-Build Lab worked on numerous projects, including: 1) Electrodynamic ion trapping, 2) Quantized conductance, 3) Weak-localization in thin films, 4) Dynamical magnetic trapping, 5) Chaos in electronic circuits, 6) Thermoelectric properties, 7) Vacuum techniques, and 8) Holographic interferometry. Students typically worked in two-student teams for one academic term, and many of the projects were passed on from term to term, being worked on by a succession of teams. Two student-led research papers are currently in preparation describing progress in quantized conduction and ion trapping, and we presented results at the 2012 Conference on Laboratory Instruction - Beyond the First Year of College. The Design-and-Build Lab is still in operation, and we hope to continue it into the indefinite future as funding permits. Our most successful student project was in Electrodynamic Ion Trapping, involving the combined efforts of over a dozen students over several years. As it became clear that the project had great potential, we secured additional funding from Caltech donors to subsequently develop a teaching lab experiment around what we had learned (see images). Three copies of the resulting experiment are currently in use in the Introductory Physics Laboratory course at Caltech, and a small company was formed (see NewtonianLabs.com) to manufacture and distribute the experiment to other physics teaching labs.
