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Session 3220

LabVIEW : A MODERN DATA ACQUISITION SYSTEM IN AN INTRODUCTORY MECHANICS LABORATORY

Richard A. Young Department of Chemistry and Physics, University of Portland, Portland, OR 97203. young@up.edu

I. Introduction

As the title suggests, this paper describes our implementation of LabVIEW in our freshman level mechanics laboratory. The laboratory is closely coupled to a traditional lecture based physics course composed of engineering, physical science, mathematics, and computer science students. Over the past decade there has been a significant amount of instructional research and development in the teaching of physics at the introductory level1-10. This work has demonstrated that the capability to rapidly acquire and display data provides a valuable tool to promote student experimentation and understanding. As a result a number of computer oriented educational packages that are directed toward the introductory physics laboratory experience have been developed.11-13

Rather than adopt one of these packages we decided to employ LabVIEW, a commercially oriented data acquisition environment, in the computerization of our laboratory. This decision was motivated by a number of factors which we wanted our computing environment should provide. Among these were providing:

• Students with an early exposure to a data acquisition environment which is widely used in industry and which could be used in both their upper division courses and post graduation employment. • The capability to rapidly develop new data acquisition modules so that the laboratory could easily evolve to incorporate new sensors and experiments as needed. • The opportunity to encourage students to adopt a "systems modeling" approach toward experimental design2 through LabVIEW's data flow programming paradigm. • An easily understood student/computer interface.

The remainder of the paper discusses these points in more detail. Section II provides a brief description of the institutional setting and the laboratory philosophy. Section III describes the hardware and software used in the laboratory, Section IV describes our development activities, Section V illustrates a "typical" experiment using LabVIEW for data acquisition, and finally in Sec. VI we present some concluding remarks.

II. Institutional and Course Context

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Young, R. A. (1997, June), Labview : A Modern Data Acquisition System In An Introductory Mechanics Laboratory Paper presented at 1997 Annual Conference, Milwaukee, Wisconsin. 10.18260/1-2--6663