GONZAGA UNIVERSITY

Physics Department



Introductory Physics laboratories at Gonzaga University accompany each of our Introductory Physics courses.  The laboratory courses are:
 We do not distinguish between calculus based and algebra based students when students schedule a lab section.  That is, our first semester introductory lab sections contain a mixture of students from both PHYS 101 and PHYS 103.  The same is true for the second semester laboratories.  This does not present a problem because the labs require basic math skills, not calculus, as well as experimental skills and common sense.

Our lab sections run for three hours, and we will typically have nine sections scheduled per week of each of the 101/103 and 102/204 labs, both in the fall semester and in the spring semester.  Our section size is limited to sixteen (16) students maximum, due to space and equipment constraints.  We have two separate lab rooms, each dedicated to our labs -- one for first semester sections, and one for the second semester sections.

We have eight Pentium 4 3 GHz CPU PC's in each introductory lab.  All of these are networked.  Each lab room has it own networked printer.  We have 16 PASCO Science Workshop interfaces in the labs, and use them on about half of the labs we have students perform in the 101/103 lab.  We do not presently use the interfaces in the 102/204 labs.

Experimental equipment ranges from simple things like pendula to more complex items like the PASCO motion sensors.  A list of experiments done in the 101/103 laboratory, as well as links to PDF format files of the lab handouts, can be found at:  http://www.phy.gonzaga.edu/phys103_link.html.  These lab handouts likely describe the equipment in sufficient detail to give a sense of what we do here.  We do not presently have available downloadable handouts from the 102/204 lab.

We have undergraduate students employed as TAs for each of these lab sections.  The TAs help out during the lab period, and in most cases collect the lab reports and do most of the grading of these.  Many of the TAs are Physics majors, but we also employ engineering students and students from other sciences as TAs.

The set-up and take-down of the lab equipment is done by us -- we presently do not have anyone employed as a lab technician.  Each semester one of us is in charge of this task for one of the labs, and so one credit is given for that time and effort toward the normal teaching load of that person.

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AJG 9/28/07