I was not too recently ranting to some poor captive audience about the things which should and should not be labs, and how the topics existed on a scale of "doing science for primitives and stepping back into your time machine having advanced science by millennia" and "I swear everything related to this might as well be somewhere between voodoo and 1920s psychology." My ire was directed at calorimetry. They saddle high school students with calorimetry experiments, when really, as a field of measurement, unless you've got some great equipment and an amazing understanding of the possible hidden inputs, the error bars on your standard calorimetry experiment could accommodate a battleship doing a handbrake turn. At a high school level, calorimetry should be restricted to samples of ammonium nitrate dissolving in water and perhaps thermite, with checkboxes to indicate "got hot" or "got cold."
This is a similarly fraught deal and a cruel joke to play on an undergrad. Poor quality crystals, no explanation of appropriate solder, temperature control is non-existent. It's crap like this that turns people off of science. I have a physics degree and spent a lot of time tutoring; my big takeaway is that there exists a cabal of lizard people attempting to retard the technological advancements of humanity through a variety of gambits such as "social media," but that their biggest payoff has to be "labs."
And then, as a kind of extra special grift, are the kits. These are end-of-budget-year purchases which collect dust until someone gets the bright idea to actually hurl one of these beasts at the students. We received some kit involving fiber optics that was beyond terrible. I ended up tearing it apart and, with a DAQ and an XY plotter, created the world's slowest scanner. One thousand dpi, which isn't bad for 1992. The kit itself had pre-built experiments which seemed designed for little but frustration.
Even chemistry labs have better yields than this sort of thing. It's disheartening and students take this more personally than you might imagine.
I was not too recently ranting to some poor captive audience about the things which should and should not be labs, and how the topics existed on a scale of "doing science for primitives and stepping back into your time machine having advanced science by millennia" and "I swear everything related to this might as well be somewhere between voodoo and 1920s psychology." My ire was directed at calorimetry. They saddle high school students with calorimetry experiments, when really, as a field of measurement, unless you've got some great equipment and an amazing understanding of the possible hidden inputs, the error bars on your standard calorimetry experiment could accommodate a battleship doing a handbrake turn. At a high school level, calorimetry should be restricted to samples of ammonium nitrate dissolving in water and perhaps thermite, with checkboxes to indicate "got hot" or "got cold."
This is a similarly fraught deal and a cruel joke to play on an undergrad. Poor quality crystals, no explanation of appropriate solder, temperature control is non-existent. It's crap like this that turns people off of science. I have a physics degree and spent a lot of time tutoring; my big takeaway is that there exists a cabal of lizard people attempting to retard the technological advancements of humanity through a variety of gambits such as "social media," but that their biggest payoff has to be "labs."
And then, as a kind of extra special grift, are the kits. These are end-of-budget-year purchases which collect dust until someone gets the bright idea to actually hurl one of these beasts at the students. We received some kit involving fiber optics that was beyond terrible. I ended up tearing it apart and, with a DAQ and an XY plotter, created the world's slowest scanner. One thousand dpi, which isn't bad for 1992. The kit itself had pre-built experiments which seemed designed for little but frustration.
Even chemistry labs have better yields than this sort of thing. It's disheartening and students take this more personally than you might imagine.