PHY131 Physics Practicals - Fall 2010

The Practicals part of your PHY131 course will involve problem solving, hands-on activities and team-work. What you do in Practicals will be directly related to what is going on in class and will help you to do well on the tests and exam. This is the home page for the Practicals. The contents of this page are:

• Calendar and Schedule
• About the Practicals
• Requirements and Marking
• People
• Computers and Networks

Calendar and Schedule

You may want to note that initially the Practical "cycle" is from Monday through Friday. After the Thanksgiving holiday on Mon. Oct. 11, the cycle shifts to Tuesday through Monday of the following week. There is no Practical on Tues. Oct. 26, and the cycle then shifts to Wednesday through Tuesday of the following week. This does not means that the day and time of your Practical will change: you will always attend your Practical on the same day of the week and at the same time all term.

Unless otherwise stated, all links below are in pdf format, and will open in a new tab/window.

You may wish to know that all of the Modules that are linked to above and more is available at the main Practical site at:

http://www.upscale.utoronto.ca/Practicals/.

About the Practicals

The Physics Practicals are a vital component in your learning the material of PHY131.

The heart of your learning in the Practicals will involve you working on Activities in a Team with 2 or 3 of your classmates. The Activities tend to focus on the concepts being discussed in your classes in Convocation Hall, although other aspects of Physics will sometimes also be introduced. Each Practical session will also include time for student questions and discussion. You will have two Learning Assistants present for each Practical session, who are probably Physics graduate students working on their M.Sc. or Ph.D. in Physics.

You will attend a Physics Practical almost every week of the term, and each session lasts one hour and 50 minutes.

Your Team will keep a single lab book, which is to be a complete record of everything you did, what you and your teammates thought it meant, and what conclusions you have drawn from your work. The lab book is not to leave the Practical room.

For each Practical session two members of each Team will serve the following roles:

• Facilitator. This person, a different individual each week, is responsible for keeping the Team on track with the Activities. When the entire Practical group discusses some topic, the Facilitator will be the Team’s primary spokesperson.
• Recorder. This person, also a different individual each week, takes primary responsibility for recording all work, speculations, conclusions etc. in the lab notebook.

Different Teams work at different paces, and you will discover that in addition to required Activities, every week there will be If You Have Time (IYHT) Activities. These should only be attempted when you, your Team, and your Instructors all agree that you have learned as much as possible from the required Activities. As you will see below, doing IYHT Activities can earn your Team a small bonus mark.

For Practical session 7, the Learning Assistants will re-assign students to new Teams.

Requirements and Marking

In the Calendar and Schedule section above, links are provided to the Module containing the Activities you will be working on that week. It is an excellent idea for you to have looked over the Module and required Activities before coming to your Practical. From time to time there will be some assignments that are required before coming to your Practical, and these will be given in the Calendar and Schedule section too.

The Practicals are worth 20% of the mark in PHY131. The components of the marks and their weights are:

1. Notebook Mark 1 (0% of the course mark). After the first Practical the lab books will be collected and marked. However, this mark will not count towards your Practical mark. Instead it is intended to make our standards and requirements clear to you.
2. Error Analysis Assignment (4% of the course mark). You will do this assignment individually. It is due in the Drop Box of your Learning Assistants by 4 PM on Wednesday October 13. The Drop Box of you Learning Assistants is given below: they are located in the basement of McLennan, and on the first floor just above the boxes is a bust of Newton. A link to the assignment is given in Week 2 of the the Calendar and Schedule section above.
3. Notebook Mark 2 (8% of the course mark). After Practicals Session 5, a selection of the activities from Practical Sessions 2-5 will be chosen to be marked. The decision of which Activities will be marked will be chosen more-or-less randomly after the books have been collected. All Teams will have the same Activities marked.
4. Notebook Mark 3 (8% of the course mark). At the end of the term a selection of the activities from Practicals Sessions 6-10 will be chosen to be marked. The decision of which Activities will be marked will be chosen more or less randomly after the books have been collected. All Teams will have the same Activities marked.

All marks are on a 5-point scale from 0 to 4:

0. Missing work.
1. Seriously deficient.
2. Requires improvement.
3. The standard mark indicating good work.
4. Exceptional. We will be very stingy in awarding marks of 4.

As discussed above, every week there will be If You Have Time (IYHT) Activities. These should only be attempted when you, your Team, and your Learning Assistants all agree that you have learned as much as possible from the required Activities. Teams that did well on the chosen IYHT Activity get a 0.5-point bonus, while teams that didn't do it or tried but didn't do well on it get no bonus points.

In order to learn, you must attend. So that you learn as much as possible, we expect you to attend each Practical for the full 110 minutes. If you do not attend, show up late, or leave early, you are not only impacting your own learning, but you are also letting your teammates down. The attendance policy is:

• If a student arrives more than 20 minutes late (ie later than 30 minutes past the hour), then he or she is counted as absent for that day. If a student leaves more than 10 minutes early, he or she is counted as absent for that day.
• The Practicals mark (worth 20% of the course mark) will be converted to a mark out of 100. The number of absences each student has will be cubed and deducted from this total out of 100. Effectively, this means that one absence generates a 1% penalty in Practicals mark. Two absences generates an 8% penalty. Three absences generates a 27% penalty, etc.

People

Course Administrator: April Seeley. Office : MP129, Phone 416-946-0531.

Technologists: Larry Avramidis, Lilian Leung, Phil Scolieri, and Rob Smidrovskis. Office: MP127.

Instructors

Practicals Coordinator: David M. Harrison. Office: MP121B. Phone: 416-978-2977. Email: david.harrison AT utoronto.ca

Practicals Instructor: Kausik S. Das. Office: MP129D. Phone: 416-978-7783. Email: kdas AT physics.utoronto.ca

Learning Assistants

TA Meeting 1 Wednesday 3 - 4 PM, Room 125C [not for students]. Regular attendees: Ian Chan, Di Tian, Adam Smiarowski, Cuathemoc Salazar, Hoda Hossein-Nejad, Wei Cui, Liu Nai Rui, Zen Marianim, Dan Sun, Aida Delfan, Joe Yen, Ryan Vilim, Joseph Mendonca, Parisa Zareapour, Zhe Jiang, R. Andrei Romero Alvarez, Mario Palasciano, Cristen Adams, Zhenfu Zhang, Russel Blackport, Ray Meng Gao, Abdullah AlRashid

TA Meeting 2 Friday 4 -5 PM, Room 125C [not for students]. Regular Attendees: Ashleigh Ingle,Zuoming Qian, Matin Hallaji, Yang Yang, Liang Ren, Zhiyuan Tang, Gabriello Presenza Pitman, Ellen Dyer, Juan Miguel Arrazola, Shreyas Potnis, Xiaoyi Zhao, Matt Russo, Parinaz, Aleahmad, Alex Forcier, Cathal Smyth, Yuchong Li, Vyacheslav Burenkov, Juan N. Quesada, Yao Tian, Stephen Foster, Ben Mossbarger, Daniel O'Keeffe, Daniel Fine, Juan Rosas, Ting Wang, Chao Zhuang

Computers and Networks

The Practical server is: feynman.physics.utoronto.ca.

You will access the server using your UTORid and password. You will have access to three folders on this server:

1. Your home directory. You have read and write privileges for this directory.
2. Your team directory. All members of your team have read and write privileges here.
3. public . This is an area of the server containing documents, computer programs, etc. Everyone has read privileges for this directory.

Note : you should never save work on the local PC. These discs will be ruthlessly purged on a regular basis.

Remote Access

You may access the server at: https://feynman.physics.utoronto.ca . You may upload and download files from your computer to the server.

Printing

There is a colour printer in each Practical Room. You may choose to print either in colour of black and white by choosing the appropriate printer in the print dialog. We charge for printing using your TCard . We charge:

• 10 cents per page for black and white printing.
• 15 cents per page of colour printing.

We do not (yet) have facilities in the building to add dollar values to your card. The locations of cash-to-card locations are listed at:

http://www.utoronto.ca/tcard/where.html

This page is maintained by David M. Harrison, Dept. of Physics, Univ. of Toronto.

Last revision: $Date: 2010/11/17 13:37:07 $ (y/m/d UTC).