Lab Letter Guidelines Lab Letter Guidelines PURPOSE: Regardless of what STEM field you work in or what your particular job is, you will regularly have to write reports, technical documents, etc. Employers highly value the ability to articulate and communicate how data leads you to a particular conclusion in addition to your technical credentials (Lab Analyses and Letters). Additionally, the audience you write for may not always have a technical background, so learning to write for a variety of audiences is important (Lab Letters). Like any other skill, it only improves with practice and hard work. My goal is to give you opportunities to build your skills as you progress through your scientific education. The lab letter provides an opportunity to: · practice communicating scientific ideas in a less formal setting than a typical lab report. · practice communicating scientific concepts to a non-technical audience. · revisit the concepts in the lab activity, thereby strengthening the new neural connections forming in your brain. ASSIGNMENT: The lab letter is a summary of a lab activity we do in class written for a non-physicist. This non-physicist is not fictitious; you will compose and send a letter to a friend, family member, significant other – someone in your life for which you would like to share a little about the physics you are learning. A good lab letter will: · be written in the tone of an email. (This means you are conversational, and yet you still need to use correct grammar.) · describe the experimental set-up/procedure in sufficient detail for a person unfamiliar with physics to understand. Pictures are not required, but they can go a long way in helping someone understand the set-up. · describe results and their physical significance clearly and correctly. · have correct grammar and spelling. · summarize the results (usually a graph) and explain what they mean/what you learned, focusing on the physical interpretation rather than the numbers. · answer three questions that connect the lab to reality: · - Why did we do this? · - What is the greater purpose? · - How does this tie into your everyday life? SUMBISSION: Email the letter to your recipient and include Drs. Schoene and Daane on the email. Please include “Lab Letter #,” with the appropriate number in the subject line. GRADING: We will use an improvement-based grading method to determine the final score for the lab letters. This means if the lab letters show improvement over the quarter, the score for the last lab letter will become the overall score for all the lab letters. If the lab letters do not improve over the quarter, all the scores will be averaged (standard grading method). If a lab letter is not submitted, the lab letter scores will be averaged as well. Improvement-based grading reflects that good written communication is a skill that improves over time, rather than something students are expected to do well from the beginning of the class. Pleas ...

1. Lab Letter Guidelines
Lab Letter Guidelines
PURPOSE: Regardless of what STEM field you work in or what
your particular job is, you will regularly have to write reports,
technical documents, etc. Employers highly value the ability to
articulate and communicate how data leads you to a particular
conclusion in addition to your technical credentials (Lab
Analyses and Letters). Additionally, the audience you write for
may not always have a technical background, so learning to
write for a variety of audiences is important (Lab Letters). Like
any other skill, it only improves with practice and hard work.
My goal is to give you opportunities to build your skills as you
progress through your scientific education.
The lab letter provides an opportunity to:
· practice communicating scientific ideas in a less formal
setting than a typical lab report.
· practice communicating scientific concepts to a non-technical
audience.
· revisit the concepts in the lab activity, thereby strengthening
the new neural connections forming in your brain.
ASSIGNMENT: The lab letter is a summary of a lab activity we
do in class written for a non-physicist. This non-physicist is not
fictitious; you will compose and send a letter to a friend, family
member, significant other – someone in your life for which you
would like to share a little about the physics you are learning.
A good lab letter will:
· be written in the tone of an email. (This means you are
conversational, and yet you still need to use correct grammar.)
· describe the experimental set-up/procedure in sufficient detail

2. for a person unfamiliar with physics to understand. Pictures are
not required, but they can go a long way in helping someone
understand the set-up.
· describe results and their physical significance clearly and
correctly.
· have correct grammar and spelling.
· summarize the results (usually a graph) and explain what they
mean/what you learned, focusing on the physical interpretation
rather than the numbers.
· answer three questions that connect the lab to reality:
· - Why did we do this?
· - What is the greater purpose?
· - How does this tie into your everyday life?
SUMBISSION: Email the letter to your recipient and include
Drs. Schoene and Daane on the email. Please include “Lab
Letter #,” with the appropriate number in the subject line.
GRADING: We will use an improvement-based grading method
to determine the final score for the lab letters. This means if the
lab letters show improvement over the quarter, the score for the
last lab letter will become the overall score for all the lab
letters. If the lab letters do not improve over the quarter, all the
scores will be averaged (standard grading method). If a lab
letter is not submitted, the lab letter scores will be averaged as
well. Improvement-based grading reflects that good written
communication is a skill that improves over time, rather than
something students are expected to do well from the beginning
of the class.
Please see rubric online in the canvas assignment for more
information!
Example Lab Letter (I am sorry the pictures are missing!)
Hi Mom,

3. I am writing to tell you about some cool physics we did in our
class recently.
First, here is the setup:
Our experiment is called Balancing a Ruler. We started with a
100 cm ruler, with a set under the 65 centimeter mark. We set
this up on a table. This had the ruler offset to one side, meaning
it is not balanced. We have created a lever, with a long end and
a short end. We next placed a 250 gram weight on the short end,
at the 75 cm mark. Note that this is 10 cm from the fulcrum.
This weight caused the lever to tilt, until the short end rested on
the table, and the long end hung in the air. You may want to
check out the picture below to help illustrate the setup.
Next, we used various weights (6 in total) placed on the long
end of the ruler, to balance the ruler so that neither end touched
the table. First up, we tried a 30 gram weight. We placed this on
the long end, and adjusted its position until balance was
achieved. We found the ruler balanced with the 30 gram weight
42.3 cm from the fulcrum. The results are shown in the table
and graph below.
We found some pretty neat patterns here.
First, notice on the graph, we see that as the weight increased,
the distance from the fulcrum decreased. So, more weight used
to achieve balance results in less distance out from the fulcrum.
We learned that this is called an inverse relationship between
weight added and the distance from fulcrum – I think of this as
inverse because, as one goes up, the other goes down.
An interesting thing happened when we used the 250 gram
weight, we achieved balance at 5.5 cm away from the fulcrum.
This is interesting, because the weight on the short end is also
250 grams, but it is 10 cm away from the fulcrum. Why did that
happen? This is because the long end and short end of the ruler
have different weights. The long end of the ruler weighs more

4. than the short end, and affects the balance. What we observed is
a lever. The longer the lever, the less force is required to move
it. Moving the weight away from the fulcrum created a longer
lever, so less weight (force) was required to achieve balance.
Moving the weight towards the fulcrum created a shorter lever,
so more weight (force) was needed! So the ruler factored into
the balance more than I originally thought.
Another interesting principle can be seen in the data. On the
graph you can see that as our curved line approaches either axis
line, it seems to “line up” or become parallel with the axis. If
we were to continue this experiment with additional trials to
gain more data, we can predict the line would continue in the
same manner. In fact, the curved line will never cross either
axis. On the graph this would be called an asymptote. An
asymptote is a line placed on the graph representing a value that
our data will approach but never equal. We call this a “limit” of
the data. This means that no matter how far from the fulcrum we
move, we will always need to add a weight to achieve balance!
The weight required will never be zero, although it will get very
close to zero. Imagine the lever lengthened equally in both
directions. We could go as far out on the long end as we choose,
but as long as the ruler keeps the same proportionality, we will
always have to add weight to achieve balance. The short end
will always rest on the table with zero additional weight.
On the other end of the spectrum, as we use a heavier and
heavier weight, we move closer to the fulcrum. The weight must
be on the long end of the ruler to result in balancing the lever.
We could use a weight of several kilograms, but we will never
achieve balance unless the weight is moved away from the
fulcrum. Weight will always need to be a distance away from
the fulcrum, even though this distance will become very small.
This experiment showed some cool (and logical) principles at
work. We were able to set up and conduct an experiment,
collect data and create a graphical representation. Our findings

5. revealed an inverse relationship between weight added and
distance from the fulcrum. We also found that there are limits to
how small the weight could become to achieve balance, and how
close to the fulcrum we could move the weight to achieve
balance. I feel like because of this lab, I better understand
inverse relationships, which are far more common than I ever
thought about before. For example, we use this particular one
all the time when carrying a tray of dishes, or using a seesaw, or
even a baby’s mobile balancing above their crib. I have a
feeling this inverse relationship will come in handy when
studying more concepts in physics this year.
Big Hugs –
A student
3
W131 Spring 2018
WP2 Article
When Will Tech Disrupt Higher Education?
Feb 5, 2018 Kenneth Rogoff
Universities pride themselves on producing creative ideas that
disrupt the rest of society, yet higher-education teaching
techniques continue to evolve at a glacial pace. Given
education’s centrality to raising productivity, shouldn’t efforts
to reinvigorate today’s sclerotic Western economies focus on
how to reinvent higher education?
Cambridge – In the early 1990s, at the dawn of the Internet era,
an explosion in academic productivity seemed to be around the
corner. But the corner never appeared. Instead, teaching
techniques at colleges and universities, which pride themselves
on spewing out creative ideas that disrupt the rest of society,
have continued to evolve at a glacial pace.
Sure, PowerPoint presentations have displaced chalkboards,

6. enrollments in “massive open online courses” often exceed
100,000 (though the number of engaged students tends to be
much smaller), and “flipped classrooms” replace homework
with watching taped lectures, while class time is spent
discussing homework exercises. But, given education’s
centrality to raising productivity, shouldn’t efforts to
reinvigorate today’s sclerotic Western economies focus on how
to reinvent higher education?
One can understand why change is slow to take root at the
primary and secondary school level, where the social and
political obstacles are massive. But colleges and universities
have far more capacity to experiment; indeed, in many ways,
that is their raison d’être.
For example, what sense does it make for each college in the
United States to offer its own highly idiosyncratic lectures on
core topics like freshman calculus, economics, and US history,
often with classes of 500 students or more? Sometimes these
giant classes are great, but anyone who has gone to college can
tell you that is not the norm.
At least for large-scale introductory courses, why not let
students everywhere watch highly produced recordings by the
world’s best professors and lecturers, much as we do with
music, sports, and entertainment? This does not mean a one-
size-fits-all scenario: there could be a competitive market, as
there already is for textbooks, with perhaps a dozen people
dominating much of the market.
And videos could be used in modules, so a school could choose
to use, say, one package to teach the first part of a course, and a
completely different package to teach the second part.
Professors could still mix live lectures on their favorite topics,
but as a treat, not as a boring routine.
A shift to recorded lectures is only one example. The potential
for developing specialized software and apps to advance higher
education is endless. There is already some experimentation
with using software to help understand individual students’
challenges and deficiencies in ways that guide teachers on how

7. to give the most constructive feedback. But so far, such
initiatives are very limited.
Perhaps change in tertiary education is so glacial because the
learning is deeply interpersonal, making human teachers
essential. But wouldn’t it make more sense for the bulk of
faculty teaching time to be devoted to helping students engage
in active learning through discussion and exercises, rather than
to sometimes hundredth-best lecture performances?1
Yes, outside of traditional brick-and-mortar universities, there
has been some remarkable innovation. The Khan Academy has
produced a treasure trove of lectures on a variety of topics, and
it is particularly strong in teaching basic mathematics. Although
the main target audience is advanced high school students, there
is a lot of material that college students (or anyone) would find
useful.
Moreover, there are some great websites, including Crash
Course and Ted-Ed, that contain short general education videos
on a huge variety of subjects, from philosophy to biology to
history. But while a small number of innovative professors are
using such methods to reinvent their courses, the tremendous
resistance they face from other faculty holds down the size of
the market and makes it hard to justify the investments needed
to produce more rapid change.
Let’s face it, college faculty are no keener to see technology cut
into their jobs than any other group. And, unlike most factory
workers, university faculty members have enormous power over
the administration. Any university president that tries to run
roughshod over them will usually lose her job long before any
faculty member does.
Of course, change will eventually come, and when it does, the
potential effect on economic growth and social welfare will be
enormous. It is difficult to suggest an exact monetary figure,
because, like many things in the modern tech world, money
spent on education does not capture the full social impact. But
even the most conservative estimates suggest the vast potential.
In the US, tertiary education accounts for over 2.5% of

8. GDP (roughly $500 billion), and yet much of this is spent quite
inefficiently. The real cost, though, is not the squandered tax
money, but the fact that today’s youth could be learning so
much more than they do.
Universities and colleges are pivotal to the future of our
societies. But, given impressive and ongoing advances in
technology and artificial intelligence, it is hard to see how they
can continue playing this role without reinventing themselves
over the next two decades. Education innovation will disrupt
academic employment, but the benefits to jobs everywhere else
could be enormous. If there were more disruption within the
ivory tower, economies just might become more resilient to
disruption outside it.
Rogoff, Kenneth. “When Will Tech Disrupt Higher
Education?”Project Syndicate, 5 Feb 2018,
https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/tech-disruption-
of-higher-education-by kenneth-rogoff-2018-02. Accessed 2 Feb
2018.
English W131 – Reading, Writing, and Inquiry I
Writing Project #2 – Summary/Strong-Response Essay
Draft #1
1. Read WP2 article and WP2 Assignment Guidelines (in
Canvas//WP2)
2. Read/review Chapters 7a-7c, 8a-8h (or 8g in 1st ed.), and 15
a-g
3. Do one of the following forms of annotation:
a. Annotate a hard copy of the WP2 article as shown in the
textbook example in 7b (How Hip-Hop Music…)
b. Annotate a digital version of the WP2 article using Word
Comments
4. For the article, make a list of claims and evidence analysis

9. (see Student Model in 7c)
5. Submit the following as WP2 Draft 1:
a. Word documents showing your annotation of the article or
photos of your annotation of hard copies of the articles
b. A list of major claims and evidence for the article (the claims
are not made by the article’s authors; instead, the authors quote
other people, so make sure you identify who is making the
claims)
(If you do this assignment correctly, you will be submitting 2
items – annotation and claims list for the article)
6. Bring documents above to next class.
1