PHYS 111L & 112L: Introductory Physics Labs

Fall 2017, Fall 2018, Spring 2019, Summer 2019, Fall 2020

My first semester teaching a lab was at Boise State University in Fall 2017, when I taught a section of the Physics 112 lab. After a brief intermission, I went on to teach a section of Physics 112 again in Fall 2018, and Summer 2019. I also taught a section of Physics 111 in Spring 2019. In Fall 2020 I taught a section of both labs.

During my last semester teaching introductory labs, I assembled instructor materials for future lab instructors. BSU's Physics Department regularly hires undergraduate students to teach lab sections, and so I wanted to make sure resources were available to help them get started. The materials consisted of answer keys to the prelabs, updated lecture notes from my previous semesters teaching, lecture slides for presenting over Zoom, and lecture aids for instructors who preferred to have notes in an outline style. The following semester I also created demonstration videos for the labs with help from my coworkers in the stockroom.

BSU Physics Lab Structure

Labs begin with a short lecture, and then students begin work on the lab exercise. The students work in groups of 3 and the equipment for the exercise is usually already set up at their lab station. After working through the procedure, students complete a group report. The requirements for the group report changed during my time at BSU, but when I left the report consisted of data, calculations, plots, and answers to post-lab questions. In addition to the group report, each student turns in a pre-lab.

Remote Teaching

Like many people, I struggled with lecturing during my first semester teaching. That struggle is part of the reason my lecture notes were so detailed. However, things were shaken up when the transition was made to remote learning for the 2020 pandemic. This included BSU's introductory physics labs.

It is difficult to provide a quality lab experience to students when there isn't a real lab, but following the shutdowns I and my fellow lab instructors were left to make the best of it. Since I taught during the fall and not the spring that year, I had the benefit of learning from the experiences of other lab instructors. My position in the physics stockroom also gave me some behind-the-scenes knowledge of the resources being developed to support lab instructors.

When the shutdowns came in the middle of the spring, instructors simply performed the lab for the students over Zoom. Over the summer, though, the stockroom developed data sets and video clips to allow for teaching the labs fully remote.

This is the approach I took when I began teaching in the fall. At first, lecturing over Zoom felt unnatural, but the remote environment had some advantages. Having access to a computer for presenting instead of being limited to a blackboard was a major asset. Even more valuable, though, is that the strange circumstances created the inspiration to create a communication channel between the lab instructors. I set up a Slack channel before the semester started, and over the semester instructors used it to share tips and resources.

Of course, the lab experience still suffered. My initial hope was to make recorded videos for my students, but that ended up taking too much time (I found the time the following spring). Instead, for my 112 lab I created modified lab assignments to work with the data and videos from the stockroom, and for my 111 lab I used the modified assignments from another instructor.

There were both positives and negatives to the remote learning experience. My main regret is that most of the benefits affected the instructors and not the students. Hopefully those benefits will also improve the quality of the learning experience for students in the future.