Jonathan F. Reichert and Barbara Wolff-Reichert Award for Excellence in Advanced Laboratory Instruction Talk: A Project-based Lab Course Experience at the University of Minnesota

A vital component of the advanced lab course at the University of Minnesota is the 10-week experimental project. The experiments are inspired by either students’ own ideas and interests, from a list of previous projects to be improved, or from recently published articles To be approved, an experiment must be based on a prediction or model of its outcome and have some component of design and construction. Students, typically working in pairs, start from scratch by building or assembling the components of their experimental setup. In addition to the technical component, the course is communication intensive with written reports (weekly progress reports, a peer reviewed proposal, and a final report) as well as oral presentations (15 minute talk, weekly meetings, and a poster session.) In a typical year faculty, which are co-teaching this course with staff, supervise 25 projects. This talk highlights the strengths and difficulties of this approach from the perspective of someone who has worked on the course for 29 years.