United States

The global pandemic caused by COVID-19 has provoked an abrupt disruption of postsecondary education on an unprecedented scale. The present study reviews the nature of laboratory work and demonstrates how remote labs provide a viable alternative to in-person learning. Nearly every college in the U.S. has transitioned to remote learning in a short time frame. Regardless of when students return to higher education institutions, this disruption will influence the way laboratory-based coursework is conceptualized. With over half a million undergraduate physics students, the advantages of remote learning may expand STEM access to students who may have been traditionally underrepresented. Physics faculty have been generally hesitant to implement online labs for various reasons such as time, inexperience, and questionable rigor. This paper reviews the historical progression of laboratory work in the U.S., with a critique of the evolving nature of its purpose and relationship to students’ performance in physics.

AAPT SM 20

Rethinking the value of remote undergraduate physics laboratory work

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AAPT SM 21

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The 2020 AAPT Virtual Summer Meeting brought together physics educators from around the globe to learn about the latest in physics theory, research methodology and education from leaders in their field. The program featured plenary speakers, sessions, workshops and many special activities.

For more information please visit the 2020 AAPT Virtual Summer Meeting page at: https://www.aapt.org/Conferences/SM2020/index.cfm.


The 2020 AAPT Virtual Summer Meeting brought together physics educators from around the globe to learn about the latest in physics theory, research methodology and education from leaders in their field. 

In response to the COVID-19 epidemic, Seattle University moved all courses to remote instruction for spring quarter 2020. The Modern Physics Laboratory course PHYS 2060 was adapted by organizing it around the building, programming, and implementation of a home-built Geiger-Müller counter. Students had no prior LabVIEW experience and most had no electronics experience. They were provided with a National Instruments myDAQ board, an electronics breadboard, electronics components, and a schematic diagram [1] and given synchronous instruction via Zoom. They wrote LabVIEW VI's for lab bench tools and automated data acquisition. They designed and executed three nuclear physics experiments using their own software and hardware. Relative to the in-person format of the course, students executed a narrower range of experiments and did not study historic experimental literature, but gained data acquisition and electronics skills, experience in building and troubleshooting apparatus, and the satisfaction and self-confidence of making their projects from scratch.

A Home-Built Geiger-Müller Counter Based Modern Physics Lab

With funding from NSF’s DRK-12 program, the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian is researching and developing a next generation browser-based spectra visualization and analysis tool, The Spectrum Laboratory: Investigating the World of Color. Accompanying curriculum investigations enable students to use spectra from publicly available research databases -from atoms and molecules, to plants and pigments, to stars, galaxies and exoplanets - to support a wide range of authentic inquiry projects in the classroom. Spectroscopy is the universal analytical tool of science, yet it is typically touched on only briefly if at all in most people’s pre-college experience. Through this project we are testing the hypothesis that repeated opportunities to generate and analyze graphical spectrum plots and data, in association with real-world data and inquiry-based tasks, can help learners productively reorganize and prioritize existing ideas about light and color phenomena, and support them in productive participation in scientific practices.

The Spectrum Laboratory: an online learning environment for authentic inquiry

My students are used to learning physics through laboratory experiments, demonstrations, and projects. To simulate similar hands-on learning experience in a virtual classroom and make the subject more relevant, the students completed “Physics At Home Project”. They performed two physics experiments or demonstrations at home, took pictures of five things related to physics, explained how the pictures depicted physics concepts and principles, created video and QR code of their work, and presented the project via Teams, an online platform. The outcome were varieties of physics topics including, forces, Newton’s laws, heat transfer, specific heat, energy conservation, impulse-momentum theorem, and collision. During the presentation, the students were able to use physics vocabulary terms to discuss their project. They discovered relevance in some materials learned in physics by observing that everyday things in their environment are related to physics. Also, they learned how to present work in an online platform, and make YouTube video and QR code.

Physics At Home Project: A COVID-19 Necessitated Assignment

Activities to address equity and injustice in physics classes

Gauging student attendance and participation: Generic clickers versus TopHat

Sharing Physics Through Sound: Undergraduate Outreach

This summer, Wake Forest University's introductory calculus-based physics courses were delivered fully remotely for the first time. The laboratory portion of the course was primarily conducted using the iOLab Wireless Lab System. We moved to the system on relatively short notice. We conducted lab meetings through synchronous sessions on Zoom to introduce each lab. Following the sessions, students worked on the experiments independently or occasionally in pairs. I will report some of the successes and challenges we experienced.

Conducting a Summer Introductory Laboratory on Short Notice Using iOLab

The rapid shift to online instruction presented daunting problems, but also an interesting question: What do we REALLY want students to learn from an introductory physics lab? At Cuyamaca College, we decided that we cared that students (1) connected abstract course material to something concrete, (2) understood how to collect, analyze, and present data to test a scientific idea, and (3) could communicate their own scientific understanding. To do this we designed two simulation based labs and a project. The lab project, a multi-part assignment spread over the remainder of the semester, asked students to propose, design, run, and present a lab themselves using tools they had at home or could get safely and cheaply. By providing a few examples and a lot of support, we received some truly remarkable projects ranging from DC motors and electromagnets to pendulums and egg drops. Student feedback was overwhelmingly positive.

Home Lab Project: Cheap, Simple Labs Deliver Complex Lessons

A safe, nurturing learning environment, hands-on collaborative learning, interaction with women model scientists, laboratory and industrial plant tours, engagement using novel experiences, and an atmosphere of positive reinforcement were key interventions implemented in a physics camp designed to enhance the physics learning of and disciplinary appreciation by middle school girls. The Physics Wonder Girls Program provided a free, renewable energy physics-based summer camp to two cohorts of middle school girls from the Philadelphia area. Coming from diverse communities, the girls took a crash course on circuits using solar cell kits, and built and raced solar cars and boats. They compared the efficiencies of silicon cells vs. organic solar cells, built solar cells based on dyes from raspberry and blackberry fruit, and used a thermal imager to audit heat leaks. They met women physicists and engineers, toured a local food plant and presented demonstrations to a community of friends and teachers.

A Free Renewable Energy-based Physics Camp for Diverse Middle School Girls

Smartphones have the potential to revolutionize how students learn physics. This talk will introduce teachers to several hands-on activities designed to explore core disciplinary ideas in physics. The activities exploit the highly sensitive and precise sensors in the smartphones that students already own, and of which they are expert users. You will be amazed at the performance of the sensors and the diverse set of high-precision experiments that are now possible. These activities are designed to require minimal additional equipment beyond the smartphone, allowing them to be conducted in classrooms with limited resources and through distance learning programs to engage in sophisticated experimental activities at home. Several of the activities will be presented and resources to perform others will be provided. Examples include activities on motion, collisions, energy, and magnetic fields of the Earth.

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Rethinking the value of remote undergraduate physics laboratory work

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