Lab Meeting - Identified by number. For example, the first lab is Lab Meeting 1
Lab Worksheet - Where you will keep notes about what you observe and measure as you are going through the lab.
Your lab manual has Worksheets for each Lab Experience. All of your observations will be recorder in the Worksheet. The Worksheets are perforated pages in the Manual.
Lab Report - A formal writeup of the lab. You will take what you recorded in your Lab Worksheet and draw conclusions from it. This will be written up in a formal way explaining and answering questions in the lab worksheet. Each Lab Report template (except for Lab Experience 1) is available online.
It will be necessary to turn in the worksheet for each individual lab and the completed lab report.
A typical lab meeting will include the following parts:
The lab instructor will explain what the lab is about, give you any special directions, and point out anything that they noticed from grading the last Lab Report.
You will go through the lab experiments and write notes in your Lab Worksheet of what you find.
Labs are designed to be mostly experimental. When carrying out an experiment you will try various scenarios and record the corresponding results. Once you collect sufficient trial/result data, it is possible to draw conclusions about the subject of the experiment.
Thus the Lab Worksheet is used to record results and observations for the various trials.
After you are done going through the Lab and making observations in your Lab Worksheet you can start to create your Lab Report.
The Lab Report will pull together your data and observations that you have in your Lab Worksheet. The Lab Report template will usually have additional questions to answer than what you recorded in your Lab Worksheet.
It is very important that your answers on the Lab Report be as complete as possible.
The writing in your Lab Worksheet and on your Lab Report is to be your own. No copying of Lab Reports will be tolerated.
The Lab report must be turned in before the start of the next lab meeting. Usually the lab can be completed, including writing the report, during the lab meeting.
The lab manual and the lab software provide hands-on experience with the concepts discussed in the lecture portion of the class. Each Lab Experience assumes that you have read a chapter in the textbook that introduces and discusses the concepts presented. For example, Lab Experiences 4 and 6 on sorting algorithms assume that the student has read Chapter 3 of the texbook.