Experimental Physics course

Experimental Physics exams, finally over!

Today and yesterday we had the final exams of the Experimental Physics course. The students used the last couple of weeks on doing experiments around in the actual research groups at the Niels Bohr Institute. These experiments were then documented in small 4-page articles (PRL style), and the final exam was then individual oral presentations of their projects, using slides. The idea was to make it small konferences, and the students were split up into different teams where they held the presentations for each other (as well as the teachers, being there both as chairmen and examinators).

It went really well for most of the students, and it seems like they’ve learned at lot during the course. I feel like the course has been a success again this year – although I haven’t looked at the student evaluations yet..

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Posted by PJR in Teaching, 0 comments

Experimental Physics course start

This year I will be teaching as a teaching assistant in the second-year course Experimental Physics (just as I did last year). Today was the first day with the students, and it looks really promising. There are, however, a huge number of them (it seems like they ended up being 72, as compared to last year when we only had around 48).

I will be the primary teacher of the numerical math program MATLAB, as well as the typographic program package LaTeX. I will also help in the practical exercises, where the students will be doing different experiments over the course of a full day (they will do three of these experiments), in order for them to write an experimental report/article over it. We will have a lot of reports to correct for them this year..

The course went really well last year, so I hope we will be able to keep the standard again. Because of the large number of students, I ended up making a wiki for the MATLAB exercises, such that they can help themselves more during the exercise sessions. I hope it’s actually usable! This first day, it seemed to lessen the queuing for questions a little – so it might have been worth the effort (and anyway, I can use it as-is next year as well).

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Posted by PJR in Studies, Teaching, 0 comments