Instructor
Prof. Lara Waldrop
5052 ECEB
Office Hours:
Wednesday 10-11 AM, 5032 ECEB
Teaching and Lab Assistants
Dawn Haken
Pratik Joshi
5068 ECEB
Gonzalo Cucho-Padin
5068 ECEB
Course Director
Prof. Jonathan Makela
5044 ECEB
Overview
There will be 5 labs and a final project.
The lab manual and necessary materials will be posted on this page.
Lab assignments and schedule
Lab assignments could be found here -
Lab report
Students within a lab group should collect data together in the laboratory during their assigned lab session.
One lab report should be submitted per group, and all group members will receive the same grade on a particular lab. Lab reports should be typed and should be approximately 5 pages long (excluding hard copies of any code written for the lab, which should be included as an appendix).
Lab Report Format
The report should contain the following sections:
Introduction
- a concise summary of background concepts needed to understand the experiments
Experimental Procedure
- a list of hardware used in the experiment, including diagrams of experimental setup as appropriate
- a brief summary of the steps used to make observations (in your own words)
Results
- a summary of all measurements and calculations, including figures or tables of data as appropriate
Discussion
- a description of the consistency of the results with expectations
- a summary of potential sources of experimental bias or uncertianty
For labs with multiple stations or parts, the above report structure should be used independently for each experiment (i.e., two experimental procedures should not be combined into the same section).
Questions and instructions that appear in your lab manual in bold font must be addressed explicitly in your lab write-up. You may choose to answer such questions throughout the report where they best fit with the report content, or you can choose to tabulate a set of answers as an additional report section titled “Further Questions”. For example, answering a question about the agreement between your data and theory is best done in the Discussion section, while hypothetical questions about alternative experimental configurations are best answered in their own additional section.
Lab grading policy
Lab reports are due in lab one week after that lab segment has ended. Late laboratory reports will be penalized 10% for each day late.
If you are unable to attend lab at your regularly scheduled time, you must notify your TA at least 24 hours in advance so that your TA can accommodate your absence. If you miss lab with no notice or with less than 24 hours notice, we will arrange a special makeup lab. Such make-up labs will be held towards the end of the semester or during the projects week, i.e. just after the LIDAR lab. In such cases, your lab report must be an individual report (separate from the group report) and will be deducted 50%.
If you have a question or concern regarding your graded laboratory report, please submit a written description to your lab TA explaining detailing why you think a correction should be made. Such requests for regrades must be submitted within one week of your graded lab being returned to you.
Labs
