Well, one of the main challenges that students coming
into this class are facing is that for many
of them, the last time they did an experiment in a physics
class may have been a high school class where
the experiments were set up to in a certain sense, just work.
So they could push the button and get the data
and then learn something about whatever the piece of physics
that was being studied, whether it was colliding two
carts to learn about conservation of momentum,
or swinging a pendulum to learn about harmonic oscillators,
something like that.
Usually, the instructor who taught them
that experiment set it up in such a way
that the experiments were themselves
were not the challenge.
It was learning the physics.
By the time students get to their third year of the physics
major, they really know an extraordinary amount
of physics.
And that is really a secondary goal
of what we're teaching here.
Junior Lab is really about the professional development
of the student as a scientist, and that means things
like approaching a difficult piece of apparatus
with an attitude that you're going
to be able to get it done, understanding
that anything you try is not going to work the first time.
You're going to have to debug it.
It's about keeping very careful records of what you've done,
so that when you have to go back and repeat it,
you can see what you've done.
There's a large number of things that sort of add up to,
this is the way a professional does
it, which is different than almost anything they've
done previously in their career as a physics student.
So one of the great challenges is
if they think they know how to do experiments,
they may have learned it in a way that was a little bit more
of a novice approach before.
So there may be some things they have to unlearn
before even getting started.
And we spend about the first month of the class working
on things like that.