Modernization of the Douglas College Physics Instruction Laboratory

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9352140 Molnar We are modernizing and improving the undergraduate General Physics Lab taught at Douglass College, the nation's largest women's college, which is located at Rutgers University. The female students who take General Physics I and II at Douglass College primarily plan to major in math, science, and engineering. A substantial number of them are minority students. The General Physics Lab has been taught separately from the lecture course with a weak connection in topics. It has emphasized tedious data-taking and quantitative verification of physical laws. In order to provide greater instructional support for these students, who do more poorly in General Physics than students on other campuses, we have completely modernized the General Physics Lab sections taught at Douglass College, in addition to tightly coupling the experiments to the material covered in lecture each week. The modernization encompasses the introduction of computer-aided experiments along with replacing outmoded apparatus. We have obtained a dozen Macintosh microcomputers with lab interfaces and sensors to run Microprocessor Based Laboratory experiments. We have also replaced of our air tracks, optics, and electrostatics experiments. Our objective is to build in our students an intuitive feeling for physical concepts through hands-on experience in the laboratory. The new experiments are based upon our success with minilabs in other courses, which focuses on understanding physics principles as they are concurrently discussed in lecture. We feel it is particularly apt to celebrate the 75th anniversary of Douglass College by changing our way of teaching physics at Douglass so that physics is no longer a major hurdle in a woman's path to a scientific career, and thus, to career equality. ***