Physics Project Lab, Paul Gluck and John King, Oxford U. Press, 2015. $99.99 (317 pp.). ISBN 978-0-19-870457-7 Buy at Amazon
With Physics Project Lab, authors Paul Gluck and the late John King invite instructors to guide their students to be apprentice physics researchers. For instructors who have never given a project-based lab course, this collection serves as a great starting point. Instructors who already use project-based labs in their classrooms are likely to find new project ideas to challenge themselves and their students.
The book’s main target is college-level physics instructors. High school instructors may find some of the projects suitable, but they may have a hard time acquiring the necessary instrumentation and may find that some projects involve concepts too advanced for students at that level. However, adventurous high school teachers should not be discouraged from picking up this book and will no doubt find ideas to challenge their most motivated students. A successful lab project, like any real scientific research pursuit, depends only in part on the researcher’s current knowledge; it relies heavily on his or her motivation, ingenuity, and persistence. Thus, by engaging with project-based labs, clever high school students may discover their love of physics before they end up pursuing another subject in college.
Physics Project Lab describes about fifty projects in detail, split up into six fields of classical physics: mechanics, electromagnetism, acoustics, liquids, optics, and thermodynamics. Projects range from Johnson noise to the physics of tuning forks, laser speckles, and the Leidenfrost effect. Appendices offer additional and less-detailed project ideas, a reference library of recommended books, and advice on setting up lab facilities and instrumentation.
The underlying pedagogy of Physics Project Lab goes back decades. And yet the book addresses the concerns stated in the American Association of Physics Teachers’ Recommendations for the Undergraduate Physics Laboratory Curriculum (2014) and the science and engineering practices identified in the Next Generation Science Standards (2013). Each project presents a short introduction to the research question, theoretical background, possible research goals, experimental suggestions, and a list of references—the references are frequently to articles from the Physics Teacher, American Journal of Physics, Physics Education, or some topic-specific journals.
If you are looking for a cookbook-like lab instruction manual, you are out of luck. Lab instructors, referred to in the book as “guides,” and their students, referred to as “researchers,” will need to consult the literature and figure out how to design an experiment with the resources available to them. Furthermore, the authors encourage instructors and students to come up with their own project ideas; but especially when designing a new project-based course, a list of ideas that have been successfully implemented is certainly valuable.
In keeping with the concept of open exploration, no specific difficulty level or time requirement is given for any particular experiment. The projects presented in the book are part of a collection of experiments that have been used for the past 30 years at MIT and for the past 20 years at the Israel Arts and Sciences Academy, a high school for gifted students.
The MIT course is one semester long with weekly five-hour lab sessions. Instructors of project-based courses will need to give their students both time and guidance to succeed. However, having worked with undergraduate students on year-long assignments developing labs for pre-health students, I wholeheartedly believe that lab projects are time well spent. Not surprisingly, the students who learned the most were the ones who helped design the labs.
Gluck, who teaches at the Azrieli College of Engineering Jerusalem, dedicated the book to King, who passed away in 2014, after a long and distinguished career as a researcher and educator at MIT. In many ways the book embodies King’s passion for experimental physics. One can hope that it will spark the interest of future experimentalists to become scientists in his mold. I encourage instructors to take the authors’ advice and dive into the adventure and uncertainty of a project that does not have a predetermined, easily found answer. Although it is not a substitute for your and your students’ ingenuity and creativity, Physics Project Lab is a valuable resource.
Ralf Widenhorn is a professor of physics at Portland State University in Oregon. He participates in curriculum development for undergraduate physics, physics education research, semiconductor physics, and digital imaging research.
