March 19, 2017

Slides and supplementary material from my CS-AAPT presentation

I presented the lab we recently did in class at the Chicago Section AAPT Spring meeting.  The lab was another one of my "single-sentence labs" which basically came down to:

"Measure the capacitance of a aluminum foil parallel plate capacitor as you vary the separation of the plates by using your textbook."

That may be more detailed than what I actually wrote on the board in class, or it might be less detailed.  I don't really remember.

All we did in this lab was make a capacitor by putting sheets of foil inside the physics textbook and measure the capacitance with multimeters that we had in the storeroom. The meters had the ability to measure capacitance. We were measuring capacitance in the nano-Farad range.

I thought the lab was a great learning opportunity for the students and for me, so I wanted to share that with other physics teachers.  I got a request for the materials and lab instructions that I used for the lab.  Since I do "single-sentence labs" there really isn't a set of lab instructions to share, but I put together my notes from what we did after the first time through the lab.

Here are the slides for my presentation with some extra notes added.

Here are the notes I used in class for discussing aspects of uncertainties in measurement.

Thanks to @DrDawes for the suggestion of the lab!  I'd love feedback from anyone who does this lab (or similar) since I plan to do this again in future semesters.

1 comment:

David Renneke said...

Very good, Andrew. Looks like you are all set to give a presentation and a Take Five at the ISAAPT meeting.
Dave