Developing a Low-Cost, Design-Driven Course in Experimental Physics

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Physics (13)This project is developing a new type of undergraduate laboratory course at Caltech called the Physics Design Lab. The course is patterned after the highly successful Engineering Design Lab courses that exist throughout the country.In the Physics Design Lab, undergraduate students are asked to design, build, and debug their own physics experiments in a professional laboratory setting, much as their engineering counterparts are asked to design and build electro-mechanical devices in the Engineering Design Labs. Resources and equipment are available to allow the students to "ask their own questions" and "design their own experiments" in tracks related to Dynamical Ion Trapping, Dynamical Magnetic Trapping, Quantized Conductance, The Josephson Effect, and Optical Tweezers, or students can design and build a Magnetoelectrodynamic Coin Shrinker demonstration. Each track presents interesting physics while still being fun to build and simple enough to enable less experienced students to be successful.The overarching goal of the Physics Design Lab is to allow students to become "practicing physicists" by giving them the opportunity to design their first experiment and to build their first simple piece of apparatus, while enabling them to learn basic experimental techniques through hands-on experience.