Table of contents

Schools and universities both maintain that practical work is an essential part of any physics course. What one teaches, how one teaches, and what form assessment takes depend largely, however, on personal judgment and the level of knowledge and skill of the students. The ideas and principles behind the course are discussed and the consequences of the choice are compared with those of the most common alternative. The organization of the laboratory and an outline of the course structure are also given.

Traditional degree programmes are under review in many universities. In New Zealand, the trend is towards dividing unit courses into still smaller parts so that, for example, an eight- or nine-unit degree may now contain 22 or 24 courses. Subdivision according to teaching methods or educational objectives into independent 'laboratory only' and 'lecture only' courses has been operating successfully for some years at all levels of the undergraduate physics programme at the University of Waikato, and similar divisions have now appeared in other subjects. The rationale of this particular division and in particular its implications for the role of laboratory work, its objectives and its assessment is discussed.

The advantages of the unit laboratory as a laboratory style is discussed. The 'unit lab' style has been adapted to teach elementary electronics in the Department of Physics at Royal Holloway College, where it has successfully been used since early 1973.

In the light of the considerable publicity that has been given to the impending shortage of fossil fuels, students are strongly motivated towards an examination of the use of solar energy to meet our needs. Thus, at a recent summer school for science teachers at the University of New South Wales, a workshop was arranged consisting of a number of experiments in this field. It was demonstrated that solar-energy experiments can be carried out using inexpensive and easily-made equipment and that quantitative as well as qualitative work is possible.

A consistent demand of students is for less importance to be given to the traditional end-of-session examination which, however carefully set, is heavily biased in favour of students with good memory, instant recall and psychic powers of spotting questions. A partial solution to the problem of student assessment is the assignment carried out in the student's own time. A problem was used which any real physicist, whether researcher or teacher, might have to carry out: to examine a physical paper closely, to check its accuracy and the accuracy of its references by use of the library, and to apply it to answer some questions. With this as a framework the students are asked for expressions of opinion. Classical papers have been used since modern papers usually require too much background knowledge. They lend themselves to the type of question which asks the student to interpret the classical results in terms of the modern knowledge he is beginning to acquire.

The concept of the atom is usually ascribed to Democritus, and its development from a philosophical abstraction to a scientific axiom attributed to Dalton (1808) and Avogadro (1811). There is, however, a parallel path which has its origins in the study of crystals, which began in the 17th century. These two lines of development were finally united in 1912, with the discovery of the diffraction of X-rays by crystals. It is from this starting point that all our ideas of structural chemistry, molecular biology and solid-state physics are ultimately derived.

In the autumn of 1973 a course on energy resources and supply was introduced for second-year physics and environmental science undergraduates. This course generated so much enthusiasm amongst the first group of students that requests were made for follow-up experimental projects. Consequently, these were developed within the existing project component of the final-year physics degree programme.

Errors in the treatment of complex concepts may be due to authors being too selective in their choice of theoretical material to include, to keep complication of the explanation to a minimum. This situation seems to exist in the treatment of Planck's derivation of the Planck radiation formula, the distribution function for the energy density of black-body (or cavity) radiation, as part of 'the basis of the introduction of quantum phenomena in the teaching of physics'. It is likely that the authors of the incorrect (or, more often, remarkably vague) accounts have attempted to keep to a minimum the complication of the historical development of the study of black-body radiation during the four years leading up to 1900 when the Planck postulate epsilon =hv was first published (1900).