Mid-May – this is a time when ETH students would normally be working flat out on projects: running experiments in the lab, constructing machines, systems and robots or designing buildings. Now the campus is deserted, the students at home. But that hasn’t stopped them designing and experimenting. How come? Here are five examples.
Measurements without high voltage
Third-year Bachelor’s students in electrical engineering and information technology can attend the Experimental Techniques lectures, where they learn to plan and carry out experiments and to interpret and document the measurements. This normally sees students working with power supplies, function generators, high-voltage probes and measuring instruments such as oscilloscopes. In the current situation, however, Professor Christian Franck and his team of lecturers have had to come up with alternatives.
They made video recordings of some of the experiments alone in the laboratory. Students can pose their questions directly as comments in the video while logging measurements and evaluating the data at home.
In addition, the lecturers invented the “stay-at-home lab”, whereby students design their own experiments using measuring equipment found around the house, get their designs assessed by the lecturers, and then conduct the experiments. This has seen a few unusual ideas come to light: one group is determining the growth of garden cress over time using nothing but a glass, a tape measure and a sheet of paper. Another is determining the circumference of the earth by means of shadows cast at two locations in Germany and Switzerland, based on a historical experiment. And a third is determining the efficiency of two kettles.
The fact that some of the experiments have nothing to do with electrical engineering is irrelevant, says Henning Janssen, one of the lecturers in Professor
Franck’s
group. Measuring garden cress is just as useful for students to learn how to plan and document experiments in a comprehensible way. It’s also a good way to practise dealing with measurement uncertainties and interpreting results.
Architecture carved in soap
