Brief introductory lectures will be held at the start of the weekly sessions at 2pm on Monday in 217 Cahill.
Labs will be held in the Cahill basement teaching lab (29, inside the racetrack corridor on the SW corner of the building)
Lab reports and notebooks will be due after the first class of the following week on Monday. This will give the instructors the time until the start of the next lab to assess the
work from the week before. Late reports will be accepted for 70% credit.
Completed final lab books MUST BE turned in by June 5.
There are 8 labs of approximately equal worth. The lab book grading will make up 80% of the course grade, with the remaining 20% being assessed based on class contribution.
Collaboration: You'll be doing the experiments with partners in groups; there are two lab stations, so two groups can work simultaneously. Each person must keep her/his own lab notebook, but sometimes the effort will be divided in that one person will be recording data while another is making adjustments or reading values, etc. Thus it is acceptable to photocopy parts for section II from another partner's lab book and paste it in to your own; try to ensure that your book has all of the necessary data. Please distribute the work equally between partners--it doesn't make sense for one person to be shouldering most of the work. You are welcome to share ideas during the lab and during the analysis, but the writeup should be your own, and at the end of the lab, each person should do their own interpretation (section IV).
Lab Reports
Part of the importance of doing labs is the analysis, interpretation, and discussion of the lab in a report written up in your book. These lab reports are expected to consist of at least the following sections:
I. What equipment was set up, and why. Don't just transcribe the lab handout, but accurately describe the equipment used and sketch the layout. You should have enough detail to allow others to repeat your experiment (or for you to figure out what went wrong if something goes awry!)
II. What measurements were made, including uncertainty estimates whenever possible. Describe how the measurements were made, and why.
III. Data Analysis. Converting raw measurements into meaningful results, plotting them when appropriate, and making uncertainty estimates of your end results.
IV. Interpretation and Discussion. What do your results mean? Discuss any unexpected results and try to explain them. What might you do differently the next time, and how could the lab be improved? Also, include a brief discussion of what you learned.
The first two sections should be recorded in your lab book during the lab session. Try to get in the habit of recording everything you do in your book as it is done; if it suffers in legibility or organization, you can summarize the important measurements on the following pages later. The write-up at home should concentrate on sections III and IV. See this link for
a short compilation of write-up hints based on former TA Thiago's experience of the 2007 Ay105 class. Note also
that senior TA Joe Antognini took Ay105 last year.
Note that the class is 9 units, with 6 units in the lab. The writeup should not take more than 3 hours. Remember this is not an engineering class, in which the write up is everything. Clear, but unpolished work is perfectly acceptable.
Lab Handouts: available now, but watch for updates at the start of the week of each class, and for shifts in the schedule. Note that the move to Cahill may make some
equipment unavailable until later in term.