SEAN ROBINSON: So we have a menu of about 20 experiments
in the lab.
Each student will do three or four
over the course of a semester.
New experiments come into lab every few years.
They usually start with an idea, usually
coming from a faculty member somewhere
in the Department of Physics.
Sometimes, the idea for a new experiment
is something that was in a research lab.
Sometimes it's just something that's
a classic technique which has, say, become a standard thing
that the graduate students in a particular professor's lab
have to do on a routine basis--
getting that into a mold that works within the structure
of our semester, where students are typically
spending about two weeks performing the experiment.
We want an experiment in this lab
to be something which doesn't simply
work when you turn it on.
We want the students to have to cause it to work.
We don't want people to simply turn the apparatus on and get
data.
We want them to cause the apparatus to give good data.
That usually means there's something
they have to calibrate.
It usually means there's lots of settings
on various parts of the apparatus, which
some of the settings give bad data and some of the settings
give good data.
And the students constantly have to be going back and forth
between some preliminary analysis and data
taking in order to evaluate whether or not
the data they've collected is good,
whether the settings they've set on their apparatus
are any good.
Getting a piece of apparatus, which
has been designed by a faculty member,
as a beautiful piece of research apparatus
which works in a reliable way, in the hands of an expert,
and getting into something which a student, who is seeing it
for the first time, can operate in a way
where they have enough intellectual space
on the apparatus that they can explore it, and understand how
different parts of it work or don't work, and yet still have
it be robust enough that it, say, doesn't break.
It will work consistently from one roughly
two week period when a certain student group is working on it
to when the next student group is working on it.
That tends to be more of a design challenge.
We get into a routine back and forth
between the faculty member who's championing
the experiment and the technical staff
really understanding what parts of an experiment
have to be changed.
And then, ultimately, someone has
to write a manual for the experiment.
There's a model we've been using for the past few years
where we get an experiment to the point
where we think it's a pretty good piece of apparatus
that a student will be able to learn a lot by performing it.
Yet we still don't have any manual written for it,
no instructions or anything.
So if a new student were to just walk up to it at that point,
it would be really a research project for them
to get it working.
Within the structure of Junior Lab,
we actually do have some room for that type of thing.
And the second semester of Junior Lab, which
is Subject 8.14, one of the experiments the students have
to perform in the course of the semester
is not simply something from our menu of roughly 20 experiments,
but it's something they have to develop themselves.
They have to write a proposal, get that proposal approved
by the funding committee, which is the staff in Junior Lab,
and then, ultimately, perform that experiment,
analyze the data, and then present it to their peers.
We have a poster session that we close out the semester
with in that course.
So something that has been useful for the past few years
when we've developed a new experiment
is we try to find one of these student groups in 8.14
who volunteers to perform that experiment
without any guidance, without any manual.
They run it through, basically, as beta testers,
from our point of view, and tell us which things worked well,
which things didn't work well.
And 100% of the time so far, when we've tried this,
the students always discover something new
that that apparatus can do, some new physics measurement
that we didn't think of.
And those new discoveries by the students
who perform that the first time, without any guidance,
inevitably, those become part of the manual
that eventually future students use as the standard manual
going forward.