Modern Physics Lab Spring 2016

Date: 13-Jan-2016

This semester I am teaching four sections of General Analytical Physics 2 Lab and one section of Modern Physics Lab. See the links on my Courses page.

I am using SageMath Cloud (SMC) for Electronic Lab Notebooks (ELN’s) for the Modern Physics Lab. SMC even has capability to create a course, so each student receives “assignments” in their project folder for the course. Then the instructor can collect the “assignments”, make comments, and return them to the students. It looks promising to me. The whole SMC is written by a professor for professors, and it is open source, so I am optimistic it will stick around. It also allows collborative documenting and programming, like Google Docs.

My initial impression is that using SMC will work well. The course started yesterday. The students quickly picked up on writing notes in Markdown, including inserting $\LaTeX$ equations. Some had to learn LaTeX for math classes, they quickly looked things up and helped other with LaTeX equations.

One problem I have is that I make groups for the students and change the groups after every experiment, or about two weeks. It doesn’t seem like the differnt students in a course can collborate with each other automatically. So far the way I have found to work this is that one student in each group has to invite the other to collaborate with their whole class project. I think this means the collborators can access all of the inviters folders, not just the experiment folders they are working on together. It would be nice to have more fine-grained control over collaboration.

I plan on updating more as the semester goes on.