Because of the pandemic, our faculty members had to be creative to be able to still teach laboratory classes. Kudos to the efforts of our senior faculty in experimental physics and engineering, and to the laboratory technicians who made this possible!
The team contacted a supplier of the laboratory equipment so that the materials, with their correct specifications, can be purchased via online platforms and delivered right into the students' homes. They made new experiments that the students can do by themselves. They revised the manuals accordingly, adding very detailed instructions for every step of the way.
The transition was also made possible by the developments in hardware and software that allows the students to use their phones (incidentally, very high-precision devices) for measurement. The built-in measuring devices like accelerometers and timers within the modern smartphones, combined with apps that can harness them for actual measurement and for the visualization of the results, made some of the traditional experiments in a physics laboratory surprisingly easy, and with much higher precision and accuracy.
As a teacher, the challenge, of course, is familiarization. It is only by doing the experiments yourself that you can guide your students into potential pitfalls or erroneous procedures. Especially with very precise digitally-acquired measurements (which the students sometimes report up to the 16th decimal place), it is difficult for the students to see if they did something wrong. You'll be like a blind tour guide (probably even worse) if you let your students do the experiment that you yourself did not test out beforehand.
And so test I did. For this first experiment, I took a video of my setup and the actual conduct of the experiment.
My class and I are still adjusting to this new setup. The pandemic will surely challenge us more in the conduct of our lab class. I just hope that we can push through with these learning activities Because that is one of the goals of the lab, after all. To develop ingenuity and creativity (the Filipino word diskarte best sums it up, actually). ■
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