Round 1 begins, highlighting your "Trained Powers of Observation," via discussion and a first "puzzler"

(Advice: work on your notebooks with paper-writing in mind and then writing the paper will be much easier.)

9:00 am - Gather at your assigned post, for a Video Puzzler: writing your way towards understanding

• With your powers of observation now primed, see what you can glean from observation of another apparatus.
• A Quiz!
• Discussion of your plans for SYSTEMATIC studies, focusing on "free decay" of a damped oscillator, for a range of damping parameters: describe to one another, and make further observations/predictions about, your apparatus, in your lab notebooks.
• Write down steps (protocols) for efficient testing of your predictions.
• Another writing exercise taken from the "Puzzler Patch": does the context provide clues?
• Sort out protocols for analogous tests can be conducted on an LCR electrical circuit.

DUE after lunch: data plotted in Igor Pro (no fit to any model required yet, but each individual must write their own "sense-making" captions describing your plots on the free decay of the system under study). Turn these in simply by importing them into your OneNote lab notebook, along with comments. (Be sure to ask yourself about issues involving RESOLUTION and any thoughts you may have on SYSTEMATIC vs RANDOM errors).

1:15PM - MOVE to the other lab space! Those who'd spent the morning in Electronics will go to Gen Phys Lab; those who'd spent the morning in Gen Phys Lab, now go to Electronics. Each day, after lunch, you will switch apparatus: "PAIRED" groups working on the SAME torsional oscillator will begin the afternoon by comparing notes via shared OneNote lab notebooks, aiming to expand their SHARED torsional oscillator dataset. (Only share data with others using the same torsional oscillator!)

• Always remember to return conversations to (reliable) FUNDAMENTALS
  What might you cite as fundamental (reliable) principles at work?
• Can consideration of extreme (limiting) cases provide insight?

Afternoon Plan:
• Those now in Gen Phys Lab: efficiently take systematic data on the free decay of the mechanical oscillators found there
• Those now in Electronics: take systematic data on analogous LCR circuits, and annotate, in your OneNote notebook, Butikov Ch 1 and study the Butikov simulations, which require you enable Java in your browser.
(Each day, we assume that taking data on the LCR oscillators will be relatively fast, leaving time to work on Butikov.)

After 4:00 pm on this FIRST day - The lab spaces are available to you until your instructor goes home for the night. You may wish to expand your data sets, or to write in your lab notebook (understanding that such nuggets will help you to later write a formal paper), or you may need more time to complete your assignment in Butikov.