Liked and disliked laboratories

SC 130 Physical Science summer 2010 featured a highly customized schedule with modifications to many of the laboratories. With the laboratories at the core of the curriculum, I ran a survey on which was their favorite laboratory and which was the laboratory they least liked. This summer the laboratories included the following topics.

Laboratory one: Density of soap
Laboratory two: Velocity of a rolling ball in the gym parking lot
Laboratory three: Acceleration of gravity by dropping a ball in lab
Laboratory four: Momentum of marbles on a ruler track
Laboratory five: Force, stretching an elastic band using a cup of marbles
Laboratory six: Heat, the conduction of heat by materials connecting Styrofoam cups
Laboratory seven: Earth, latitude and longitude, meters per minute
Laboratory eight: Clouds, drawing a cloud
Laboratory nine: Sound:, clapping wood blocks to determine the speed of sound
Laboratory ten: Apparent depth, pennies underwater
Laboratory eleven: Color, rainbows, spectrum tubes
Laboratory twelve: Electrical conductivity, circuits and Ohms law
Laboratory thirteen: Chemistry, acid and base detection using flowers

The students responses are tallied in the tables below. The first table reports the favored labs in descending order of popularity.

Favorites	Votes	Reasons
13	10	surprising, used flowers, fun, interesting, changing colors is enjoyable, new ideas, learned a lot
8	7	drawing is fun, easy, learned cloud names, love drawing
7	3	Using the GPS, useful for finding lost people
6	2	easy, could understand it
9	2	I never imagined that I could measure the speed of sound, fun to try to catch up with the echo
12	2	interesting, like lighting bulbs
2	1	we were having fun doing it

The least liked laboratories in descending order from most commonly disliked.

Disliked	Votes	Reasons
9	7	difficult to measure, hard to calculate, sunny, hot, lots of walking, sweaty, tired, burning hot, headache LOL
8	4	hate rainy, cloudy days, cannot draw, hate clouds
12	4	lot of work, could not understand the numbers, shocked twice, kept burning myself
1	2	nervous because it is the first lab, felt clueless
2	2	confusing, hard to understand
7	2	hard to find Binky, tired of walking, do not understand how to use GPS
11	2	really complicated, everything in my world is black and white
5	1	too many errors in the data
10	1	boring, confusing,
≠ 8	1	All the others but 8: I hate long classes because they make me bored and sleepy

Laboratory 13 was the most favored laboratory spring 2010, and the laboratory captured top honors again this summer. Also repeating, laboratory eight was the most beloved and reviled of the laboratories. For eleven of the 28 students this laboratory stood out in their mind as their single most favorite laboratory and also as their single most disliked laboratory.

Laboratory eight is arguably the weakest laboratory in terms of the academic goals of the course, yet the laboratory appeals to students who find the rest of the course to be confusing, difficult, and frustrating. This is the one laboratory that provides an opportunity for success to some students who have artistic gifts but who are lost in the mathematics that permeates the other laboratories.

The bulk of the students evaluate a laboratory based on whether they had fun during the laboratory. Few rate the laboratory based on whether the goal of the lab was scientifically attainable. One of the academically stronger students rightly knocked laboratory five because the data was inherently problematic.

Binky is a reference to Finding Binky. Laboratory eleven was a highly modified extension of interactivity 111. As a summer one-off, necessitated by loss of access to the math-science computer laboratory during summer session, the laboratory was informal and exploratory in nature. The comment that "everything in my world is black and white" is not, however, a philosophic statement. This was simply a statement of fact by an achromat student.