In the Dark

For the next and final two weeks of my Computational Physics module the students are now working in groups of two or three on their mini-projects, so our twice-weekly lab sessions are much less structured and the students work in their groups with myself and a demonstrator to help out if they have problems. Somewhat to my surprise the lab was full this afternoon. I expected the students might prefer to work outside the scheduled times, but it was nice to see them working away together and managing to get some results. They hand in their projects at the end of next week, so they finish this part of their assessment before the exam session starts, a week after that.

The projects cover quite a wide range of material and the students have plenty of choice but some of the projects I offered didn’t have any takers. Anyway, I thought you might like to see the titles of the projects that are being done:

• Electronic Energy Levels in Aluminium
• Brownian Motion
• El Niño
• Action Potentials in Neurons
• Wave Functions in the Hydrogen Atom
• The Chaotic Inflationary Universe,
• Polytropes and the Lane-Emden Equation
• A Semiconductor Laser
• The Dimension of a Strange Attractor
• The Earth-Jupiter-Sun Interaction and Milankovitch Cycles
• Fluid Flow through a Pipe
• Random Polymers
• Modelling Infectious Diseases
• Modelling the Refraction of Light

Not all of these are to do with physics of course, but I make no apology for this as not all of our graduates will become physicists. The main point is that the projects require application of the skills taught during the module, as well as a bit of teamwork and report-writing; the latter two activities are things that theoretical physics students don’t get much practice at. I usually try to think of 4-5 new projects each year: the others are recycled.

Anyway, I look forward to reading and assessing the 14 project reports in due course!

This entry was posted on April 26, 2022 at 8:22 pm and is filed under Biographical, Education, Maynooth. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.