Physics Project Lab

Book Preface

This book is intended for our colleagues, teachers of physics at universities and colleges, and their students. While significant reference is made to material typically encountered beyond the first year of university-level study, high school teachers and their students may also find many opportunities here. Like us, many readers have probably been teaching physics most of their lives in what may be called “transmission” mode, that is, instruction by means of textbook–lesson–recitation laboratory. In this mode we, the teachers, send, and our charges, the students, receive information and skills, in conformity with John Locke’s notion that the student’s mind resembles an empty slate to be written on.

But there is another mode of instruction, exemplified by what Rousseau wrote in his book Emile: “Teach by doing whenever you can, and only fall back on words when doing is out of the question.” We may call this the transformation mode. Now, both teacher and student are transformed into explorers, with benefits to both. For the teachers in a research-based institution nothing should be more natural than to carry over the research style into some of their teaching activity. Why this does not happen more often deserves serious discussion. For teachers in a high school it is an opportunity to partake in and guide research, and this could prove to be the activity that relieves repetition and lifts them from the rut. For the student it is a chance to experience the way science works.

An important aspect of the project lab is that the teacher, though generally experienced, doesn’t always know the answers to the questions raised in the project any more than the students do. So much so that instead of the words teacher and student we will use guide and researcher. (Except when we quote.)

The two modes of learning should be combined in a proportion that suits the personalities of guides and researchers alike. It is not our aim in this book to evaluate the competing modes. The research literature in physics teaching in the past 30 years has been devoted to that, and it behooves us to be mindful of it. Rather, we should like to extend an invitation to the reader to try something different, at least as far as laboratory work is concerned, namely, to teach physics by guiding researchers through projects. It may happen that once tried, the experience will be habit forming, and that shall be our reward for writing this book. For those of our readers who have guided projects for years these remarks are like preaching to the converted. We hope that for them this book will be a source of further ideas