So, I am teaching this project lab course this semester.  Students get a full semester to make an awesome project.  It has been a roller coaster.  ups and downs all day long!

I love working with the students.  I love seeing their creativity.  I love helping them work through problems.

That said, it is a struggle and takes every ounce of energy.  Each project has their own set of issues.  There are safety issues to worry about.  There are 15+ projects going on at once.  Its hard to keep everything straight. 

Of course nothing works the first or the second time you try.  It is 100% experimental physics and engineering!  The students are learning still learning that being in the lab is about failure and overcoming it. In most teaching labs, the experiments just work.  Most of the details are worked out.  Here we have to figure them out.  It is stressful.  I go from safety discussions, to soldering circuits, to coding, to optics, to ordering, etc etc.  My head is still spinning.

Here are some more of the fun projects:

Carolina Guekjian’s hoverboard

this tiktok was fun to make:

https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZP8UCVSE3

We totally fried battery connectors today.  Oh well, science! The leaf blower lifts the board up and the thusters on the bottom push it forward. You can independently set the thruster power to turn it, like a ship.

Amanda Bowen’s thermal camera

Amanda Bowen’s has been using her thermal camera to look at temperature dependent systems.  Here is a picture of her working on the project:

Here’s the tiktok: https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZP8UCqPPj/

Sadness Intervention

But also I have brought my project lab ideas to my first year seminar.  I told them they needed to do a project, take action, and make the world better.  So a group of them are working on trying to improve sadness on campus with a simple intervention. Others are working on traffic flow, AI in college, a rate my professor ap, etc etc.