Doing Exploratory Labs

About labs

Think of labs as being like secondary school (high school) science or social science labs. Exploratory learning experiences. Try something out, answer some questions, learn from the experience.

What to do:

• You must follow the steps I give
• You must answer each question I ask

• You are encouraged try other things
• You are encouraged to comment on other things you noticed
• You may ask me additional questions

These are labs, so you should (ideally) have at least one lab partner. If anyone really hates having partners and tries it and can convince me to let them to it alone, I'll think about it... In the end, however, each person turns in their own lab report. Your lab report should list your partners and may reference your partners' reports. Your report is an online document, so treat it as one.

Lab writeups

Do the lab with a lab partner or partners. That's 2 to 3 people. Could be 4, but that's really a bit big, at least that's my instinct. Let's see. Turns out, from Winter/Spring '08, some four people lab groups worked fine.

1. work on your lab report as you go
2. experiment with a variety of tools, because you need to learn to draw, and to write rich, detailed observations.

However, everybody does their own writeup. So, you'll often have very similar answers for the embedded observations. In fact, the actual observations should be recorded at the time you do the lab, and should be transferred to the report verbatim, exactly as recorded. That's hard core methodology. Then, feel free to expand, or make comments on your observations. So the observations themselves will be the same for all the partners, but the comments might vary. The answers to the reflective questions at the end of the lab should be your own. You can discuss them, but do your own answer.

Tell me who your lab partner(s) are.

Grammar and spelling are not important in a lab assignment. Not to say don't work on your English, but I would rather you stretch your ability to communicate.

Where lab writeups go

So far, the emerging consensus seems to be, for twiki, that people want to create a new topic for each lab writeup that is a child of their homepage and is also linked from the lab assignment. Phew! That's really technical. How do you do this?

1. Create the topic for the lab writeup in the Mutualdiscovery web as a child of your homepage, either by adding a new Wikiword to your homepage and clicking on it or by clicking on the "Start A Topic" link in the navigation area and choosing your homepage as the Topic parent for the new topic. See, for example, HilaryHolz and SampleLabWriteup (This step creates a parent-child relationship between your homepage and the lab writeup.)
2. go to the lab assignment page and add a link to your lab writeup in the section called 'Lab writeups'. To do this, edit the assignment page and add the link. See, for example, VacuumLabFall08.
3. it's a great idea to hyperlink lab reports together with your labmates. 'New media' documentation is rapidly becoming industry standard.