Hello Tom,

Thanks for your wonderful response. I am very grateful for it since I get to
hear from someone who is actively doing it, rather than just me sitting here
trying to spew out stuff that may look good on paper, but can be impractical.

And yes, I agree with you that the PhET site is terrific. And to think that that
got started with Carl Wieman's Nobel prize money! :)

I am sure you came across this in one of my blog entry, but what do you think of
my "effort" in trying to revamp the undergraduate physics lab? :)

https://docs.google.com/Doc?id=df5w5j9q_4237z67cvf&hl=en

In my personal experience, the intro physics labs are missing a huge golden
opportunity to reach out to those students, especially those who are not
physics/science/engineering majors, to introduce to them on how we gather
information from observation, and how we quantify the relationship between two
different things. My argument here is that these "skills" that we can present to
them transcends the subject itself, and that it is something they will need in
trying to make an analytical evaluation of what is valid and what isn't.

I was contacted by an instructor after I started to post these, and it seems
that he tried a variation of what I suggested with encouraging results (at
least, that's what he told me). The students appear to like the labs a lot more
because essentially there's very little background preparation for them. All
they had to do was "play" with the equipment and figure out on their own terms
how to accomplish the task they were given. I think that while this may not be
suitable at a more advanced level, it is certainly useful at the intro level,
especially if we are targetting those who will not continue in physics/science.

So what do you think? :)

Zz.