Reichert Award: Adventures in Advanced Laboratory Development

Developing and teaching the yearlong junior-level Advanced Laboratory course in the Reed College Physics Department has been a major highlight of my career. In this talk, I’ll describe my approach to this course, which is based on a collection of component-type instruments. The flexible way in which these instruments can be configured makes possible a wide range of guided and independent research-style projects. The course also includes instruction in computer-based data acquisition and analysis. I’ll explain why I chose to develop this instruction on the LabVIEW platform and how this work led me to writing the book “Hands-On Introduction to LabVIEW.” With this background in advanced-laboratory development, I was able to do a short-term consulting visit to the University of Newcastle, Australia Physics Department through the support of the Fulbright Specialist program, a program I highly recommend to all interested physics educators. One outcome of this visit was learning to carry out computer-based data acquisition and analysis based on the Python programming language, which resulted in the recently published book, “The Python-Based Laboratory.” Finally, I’ll describe my work as the editor of the Instructional Laboratories and Demonstrations section of the American Journal of Physics and my vision for this section.