Virtual Laboratory for Students of Physics (Bachelor’s) and Teacher Training: Dr. Falk Röder (#FR1)

Format

Practical training / asynchronous

Keywords

Physics, practical training, virtual experiments, 3D simulation, individual measurements

Description

Each semester, the Faculty of Physics organizes practical laboratory training, in which students learn about experimental techniques in physics and consolidate their basic knowledge of methodology and the subject in general. Due to the regulations to prevent the spread of Covid-19 during the 2020 summer semester, it was not possible to conduct this practical on site. But we wanted to avoid simply giving the students pre-prepared measurement tables to evaluate as a substitute. Therefore, we looked for ways to enable the students to define experimental conditions themselves and to take measurements independently in a virtual experiment. To this end, we used Python to create 3D visualizations of 17 experimental setups from the fields of mechanics, thermodynamics, optics and quantum mechanics, which allowed the students to conduct the experiments independently. For example, for the ‘coupled oscillators’ experiment, slider controls were used to steer the pendulums. The time courses of the resulting oscillations were recorded electronically and displayed as a diagram for evaluation (see resources). The students could either run the programs locally on their computers or in their web browsers on ZIH's Jupyter HUB. Along with the experiment instructions used in previous semesters, the students also received extra instructions for conducting virtual experiments on OPAL. The students documented, evaluated, discussed and uploaded data from the experiment to OPAL for correction. A team of student assistants, research assistants and PhD students corrected the submitted protocols and gave qualified feedback to the students on the basis of guidelines and sample solutions provided to them. OPAL has an online forum and its own email feature, which allowed students and supervisors to communicate online and clarify any technical questions. The virtual experiments that we created were by no means just designed to be used for one semester – we intend to use these to support and improve the training of new supervisors and to help students prepare for carrying out real-world physics experiments in the future.

Coupled oscillators example: https://bildungsportal.sachsen.de/opal/auth/RepositoryEntry/22770614272/CourseNode/102287058967275

Contact

Dr. Falk Röder

Voting ID

#FR1