Contact Information

• Tues. 9:30 - 10:30 (Holroyd 133 or Holroyd 124)
• Wed. 2:00 - 3:00 (Holroyd 133 or Holroyd 124)
• Thurs. 9:30 - 10:30 (Holroyd 133 or Holroyd 124)
• Or by appointment

Topic: PYL 105 is the weekly two-hour laboratory that normally accompanies PHY 105, the four-hour lecture portion of the lab. As with PHY 105, PYL 105 covers vectors, elementary mechanics of point particles and rigid bodies, as well as fluids.

Course calendar Link: http://www.lasalle.edu/~blum/p105-cal-f14.htm

Meeting Place & Times:
Section 44: Friday 2:00 to 3:50
Holroyd 053
(The lab midterm and lab final will be held in a computer lab -- likey Holroyd 253.)

Learning Objectives

Students should be able to:

• Make reasonably accurate and precise measurements of physical quantities.
• Apply formulas from the lecture part of the course to the data collected in lab.
• Extract specific physical quantities from data and calculate their theoretical equivalents.
• Estimate and account for experimental error.
• Identify the appropriate units for various physical quantities and convert between different unit systems.
• Represent data graphically, fit it and extract information from it.

Assessment

When taken in conjunction with PHY 105 -- the lecture portion of the course, your grade in this lab constituents 25% of your grade in the Physics 105 course. It will be determined by weekly group lab reports, attendance/participation and two lab exams, one in the middle of the semester, the other toward the end. The relative weights are:

The midterm and final will be open notes, open book. You will be expected to analyze and plot data on these tests. If you leave it to your lab partner to perform these skills week after week, you may fail the exams. Also note that you must have your own copies of the lab for the test days; you cannot pass labs between partners during the test.

A report is written as a group and should represent a group effort. Your reports involve the analysis of the data you have taken in the lab. Reports should be written in Word with Excel plots pasted in them. A hard copy of the report should be handed in at the beginning of the next lab. There will be a 5 point reduction for each day of lateness.

Missed labs. One report grade will be dropped from your final lab grade. If you miss a lab, you should assume that it will serve as your dropped lab. (Labs are a group effort, but if you did not attend you are not considered part of the group that week. Time permitting you may be allowed to make up a missed lab.  You should communicate with the lab instructor as soon as possible.) Remember that you are responsible for the material from all of the labs and that it may appear on the tests. 

What goes into a report?

• A title - something more meaningful than "Lab 1"
  
  
• An abstract - a brief summary of what was done, that is, the essentials, not details, of the measurements and analysis. An abstract is not a statement of purpose; it is not the first few sentences of the introduction; it is not not the step-by-step procedure for the lab. (While it appears first in the report, it is typically written last.)
  
  
• An brief introduction - a paragraph or two discussing the main topic of the lab; your textbook will come in handy here.
  
  
• The procedure - discuss the essential features of what was done; we don't want a step-by-step set of instructions. It should be a description of what was done and thus written in the past tense.
  
  
• Data and analysis - present the data in the form of a table or a plot, perform any required calculations, fits, etc. You should not present large amounts of data in a table format, for example, a table that takes up more than one page is too long. (If you made a graph as part of the analysis, then it should appear in the report.  If there are many essentially equivalent graphs of repeated runs, then one sample graph may suffice.  Ask if you are unsure.)
  
  
• Conclusion - do not include comments such as "this lab was really confusing" or "I really learned a lot"; it's not that we don't want you to communicate these things, but a scientific report is not the proper place. The conclusions should be about the experiment, e.g., it did or did not agree with theory; whether you can or cannot account for any discrepancies (just saying "human error" is not accounting for error); and so on.
  
  
• The title and abstract must be separated, the other parts may be combined and rearranged so long as the report is reasonably logical. Our instructions typically ask you to do a calculation or plot some data, these should appear in your report. If we ask a question in our write-up, you should try to answer it in your report.
  
  

NOTE: Typically physical quantities have units (e.g. meters, seconds, etc.). Points will be taken off if you consistently forget to include them. In tabled data, the convention is to put the units in a column's header and not in each and every cell.