Laboratory and Classroom Services Technician
10/2005 - 8/2008
I worked in the University of Michigan's Lecture Demonstration Lab for the Physics Department. Physic's demonstrations are used in introtuctory lecture courses to illuminate the material. My primary roles included setting up physics demonstrations, teaching instructors how to use the demonstrations, creating new demonstrations and repairing broken ones. While there I built a database driven website to manage ordering and archiving of the demonstrations. I also worked with the university's selection of a clicker system for the classroom and helped instructors implement that technology in their classrooms.
- Demonstrations
- Physics Education Research
- Web Design
| I gained a tremendous amount of proficiency with the construction of complex experimental systems, both in mechanical and electronic design. Since these designs were for education, I also learned to keep the design simple and transparent. |
| The University of Michigan offers an "everyday physics" course aimed at students who don't self-identify as "science or math" people. The course was designed to be immediately relevant to student's everyday experiences. I re-wrote the lab manual for the course and developed two new experiments, one of which was published in The Physics Teacher. I also helped with the implementation of a new clicker system in the introductory physics and astronomy lecture courses and so I have experience with the use of mobile media and real-time interaction in the classroom. Physics 106 Lab Manual. |
| I had the opportunity to design and build the lab's website: University of Michigan Physic's Demonstration Lab. I constructed a complex database to archive the demonstrations, built an ordering system for the instructors, and a work schedule system for the lab. I valued this experience because it gave me a look under the hood of Web 2.0, which is not only interesting in its own right but a very powerful tool. That skill set directly mapped to the construction of elaborate physics experiments with many different components interacting with millisecond timing resolution or better. I also learned how to meet the needs of different customers, creating an intuitive interface that is used by the faculty of an entire department was instructive. I programmed in VB, used ASP.NET as the server platform with SQL on the back-end for the database. This was the prefered platform of the university. |