Many universities attempt through their lab courses to teach students how to successfully engage in physics inquiry. It is known that doing so effectively requires students to participate in genuine inquiry: Learning to do science by doing science. Still, many different approaches can be envisioned. Should students always pose their own research questions, or should we gradually allow them more freedom? What minimum knowledge is required before they can reason with scientific evidence effectively and how do they acquire this knowledge in a meaningful way? How much time should be devoted to teaching students how to communicate their results in different formats, and how can we improve the quality of their writing? And, if we succeed in designing a course with which this broad goal can be attained, what is the workload for both students and teachers? What tools do we have to evaluate whether students master the knowledge, skills and competences that allows them to participate in more complex and independent physics inquiries in later years? In this symposium, we compare the approaches to physics LAB-courses of four universities: University of Colorado Boulder (UCB), Amsterdam University College (AUC), Leiden University (LU) & Delft University of Technology (DUT). Each presenter will provide an outline of the approach and the rationale for it. One of the experiments or activities that is representative for the specific course will be highlighted. Once the different labcourses have been outlined, we will discuss their similarities and differences more deeply, with specific attention to difficulties encountered and overcome. The questions and topics addressed above will be the point of departure for an engaging discussion.@en

In our open-source model of a pandemic-resilient flipped lab course, students pose their own research questions and devise their own physics experiments. Their major instruments are an Arduino and electronic sensors which they choose from the wide and growing selection of inexpensive devices based on solid-state and MEMS technologies. Supported by the open-source software and other online resources of the Maker movement, students are empowered to design and conduct experiments at home at intermediate and advanced levels. Using flipped-lab methods, instructors devote contact hours to coaching students in refining research questions and analyzing and interpreting data, while students get continual practice in communicating their own evolving goals and latest results to their instructors and classmates. While our pilot course continued virtually unchanged in the switch to virtual classes, our students' achievements show that these methods also bear consideration for inclusion even when all teaching activities can return to campus.@en

Without any major changes, a pilot version of a physical science lab course was able to continue when the COVID-19 crisis necessitated the abrupt suspension of on-campus education. The ‘Maker Lab’ course, in which students conceive and set up their own experiments using affordable microcontrollers, required students to follow the entire arc of the empirical research cycle twice. Pedagogical literature on teaching the process of experimental research and the scientific method motivate use of these open-inquiry assignments. Further, the flipped classroom approach was used, where contact time is devoted to discussions and the students’ actual experiments were carried out independently at home or elsewhere without the supervision of an instructor. Despite the COVID-19 measures, all students were able to produce interesting and successful research projects. While there were of course difficulties encountered in the abrupt transition to online teaching, we found several counterbalancing advantages that bear consideration for including the instructional method even when all teaching activities can return to campus. We believe that three components in the design of the course were vital to the resilience of the course: the choice for fully open-inquiry projects, the decision to use Arduinos as measurement tools, and the flipped aspect of the instruction methods. We also include considerations for adapting these pandemic-resilient methods in other courses and programs.@en