Designing Advanced Labs: From Summer or Capstone Research Project(s) to Curricular Offering

It all starts with the thought: Wouldn’t it be nice to have a lab about X (and along the way learn more about it)? The driver is the curiosity to figure out the phenomenon and the desire to show how beautiful a demonstration it would be. With this commitment and some resources we begin with …a student project. After a long road (several summer or capstone projects, dead ends, and luck), we get to: hey it’s a lab after all! How the students learn about it also teaches us how to better teach it. Our experience with correlated/entangled photon labs has been as much fun to learn from them (much of it unanticipated), as it was to reach the objective of developing a curricular offering. We currently offer a laboratory for upper-level quantum mechanics based on these photon experiments.