Course Activities and Labs

As described in another document on this site (Course Design and Aims), the recent publication of the AAAS Project 2061 recommended that liberal arts science students investigate the development of Copernican astronomy, Newtonian physics, relativity theory, the history of the Earth, continental drift, the discovery of oxygen, nuclear physics, Darwinian evolution, Pasteur and the germ theory of disease, and the industrial revolution.* Such a list barely begins to suggest the wealth of historical cases available for laboratory simulation or investigation.

*Project 2061, ch. 10, pp. 111-122.

As far as possible in the laboratory experiences, students step into the shoes of a past scientist, limiting themselves to the ideas and material resources available at that point in history, working in the laboratory, field, museum, or observatory within that framework. By the end of the two-semester course sequence, students have worked their way through a range of experiences drawn from the distant past up to contemporary scientific literature. In the process they experience personally the challenge of problem-solving in significant scientific contexts, gaining a more immediate appreciation for the activity and character of investigation in the natural sciences.

For Natural Science 311, the physical sciences semester, lab and field experiences investigate the following phenomena, theories, and problems:

• Basic Celestial Phenomena (outdoors and in the Planetarium)
• Sphericity of the Earth
• Archimedes' Principle
• Aristarchos & Celestial Sizes and Distances
• Copernican and Keplerian Astronomy
• Galileo's Law of Falling Bodies (Inclined Plane)
• Foucault's Pendulum

Activities under development include (as taught by Prof. Kerry Magruder):

• Optics of the Rainbow & Law of Refraction
• Gilbert and Magnetism
• Sundials and Astrolabes
• From the Barometer to the Air-Pump
• Electricity in the age of Franklin
• Phlogiston and Oxygen
• Joseph Black, Latent Heat, and Water

The sequel to this course, US 312 Natural Sciences, emphasizes episodes in the history of the life and earth sciences. Activities include (as taught by Prof. Kerry Magruder):

• The classical microscopists
• Harvey and the Circulation of the Blood
• Natural History field experiences
• Mendel and peas
• Fruit flies
• The "Double Helix" and DNA modeling

©1998

Welcome to the Science website provided by Oklahoma Baptist University. These pages have been written by the faculty and students of the Division of Natural Sciences and Mathematics. These web pages may be printed, copied, and distributed for educational use by any non-profit educational group, so long as they are not edited or altered in any way, nor distributed for profit, nor repackaged or incorporated into any other medium or product, and so long as full credit is given to the OBU Science Program.