A story in the June 2017 issue of Physics Today recently caught my eye. An Issues and Events story by Toni Feder (page 28) stated that project-based learning is gaining popularity. I am a retired industrial physicist with my PhD in atomic theory. I’d like to share a related story.
I think it was my junior year, 1966–67, at Colorado State University. I was taking a course on modern physics; the class had two parts. The lecture part was traditional and worth five credits, if memory serves me, and the laboratory part would now be called project-based learning. It was worth two credits.
On the first day of lab class, the professor took us to the basement of the physics wing, unlocked the doors of three rooms, and said, “You may use any materials in this room, the next one, and the one at the end of the hall. You are to design and execute five experiments in modern physics, record the data, and make a report on each. The notebooks and reports will be turned in at the end of the quarter and will determine your grade for the class.” He then went back upstairs to his office. He was always available, but few needed to consult him.
We were teamed up into groups of two. In addition to choosing from several “canned” experiments, each group took on at least one original experiment. My partner and I chose to measure the stopping potential of the photoelectron. We found a regulated DC power supply with shielding, a student spectroscope, and a few odds and ends, and we cobbled together a credible experiment. The result was within 20% of the accepted value, a quite good result for the equipment available to us.
That class served me well throughout my career. It taught me to read what others had done, adapt their work, and solve problems with the equipment at hand, and it developed in me a passion for the projects I encountered. I had an exciting career that involved topics from reprogramming a direct-reading spectrograph for analytical chemistry to studying iron aluminides. The work was an equal mix of the theoretical and the experimental and was highly interdisciplinary. For example, one summer I was a student hire at Aerojet General to work on Project NERVA, an effort to develop nuclear propulsion for spacecraft.
Among other things, the project-based lab fostered a can-do attitude in me. I strongly applaud the efforts described in Feder’s story.
