- General procedures
- The laboratory is developed for 15 students per class (one and a half hour session). 5 experiments can be conducted concurrently each week at 5 different workstations. 3 students are responsible for conducting each experiment. A manager is assigned the role of over-all responsibility for conducting the experiment and submitting the final report for the group. Another student is responsible for theory and procedures, and the other student is responsible for data acquisition, presentation, and analysis (This person is in charge of the results, conclusion, sample calculations, and data tables sections). The roles of the students are rotated for each experiment. The development of the final report is done jointly by group members with the manager coordinating the effort. The roles of each student will be assigned at least one week prior to the experiment. Details of each experiment must be read completely prior to the group arriving to conduct the experiment. This provides for an informed discussion of the details of the experiment by the workstation group during the first phase of the one and a half hour lab period without the instructor being responsible for total learning during this period. The latter period of the lab period is used to complete the experimental objectives.
- The reports are due one week after the experiment is completed. The student grade is evaluated with the laboratory portion counting 20% (40% for reports, 40% for oral presentation(s), and 20% instructor&peer’s evaluations).
- Typical requirements for data sheets
Data sheets should indicate your ability to provide critical analysis of obtained data and extract useful information from the measurements (this called data reduction):
- There are tables in the end of each lab which need to be filled out.
- In addition, your measurements typically produce sets of the data points. Very good practice is to plot these data points and mark all representative points and another relevant information (such as slop of the line, e.g., elastic modulus, etc.) on the graph.
- If similar or relevant results were obtained in previous labs, please compare the values obtained by other methods.
- We are typically working with well-known materials which have been measured and studied by other people. So, please compare your results with the results readily available somewhere, for example in your “Mechanics of Materials” textbook.
- Pre-Lab assignment
Students should do the pre-lab assignments which are defined by the instructor before attending each session. It helps them to have the required knowledge for conducting the experiment before starting it. The grade of these assignments will be considered as a part of reports’ grades.
- Submitting reports
- From this semester - as a pilot system- in accordance to the paper reduction process, students are allowed to submit their group reports in a soft copy via e-mail. The format of the reports should be in PDF. (Data sheets also acceptable as a Microsoft Excel format as a complementary document to the main report which is in PDF format. Attention, any format other than these two mentioned formats are not acceptable and will not be considered).
- As it is clearly mentioned above, the only way to submit the digital copy of a report is via e-mail. Any other ways like burning files on a CD or DVD or carrying files through the pen drives are not acceptable.
- For your insurance, after receiving your reports via e-mail, the instructor will send you an acknowledgment of the receipt one working day after the sent date. If you don’t receive such an e-mail till the end of the next working day, consider that your report is not received by the instructor, so send your report again.
- You are allowed to send each sessions’ reports via e-mail before the 11:00 PM of next week after your session. Reports which are received after the mentioned time will not be considered.
Submitting hard copy of the reports are also acceptable. If you submit your reports in a hard copy format, do not send it via e-mail too. It will cause confusion and it may lead to lose your grades.
for the general format of the reports please take a look at post "Instruction of lab report format" dated 8 January 2009 of this blog. The grading system which was mentioned in that post is not valid for this semester. Just consider other materials about report format.
Good Luck!
