Final Project Requirements

Final Project Guidance

Students are given total creative freedom in the design of their final project. You are encouraged to think outside the box and to use your own experiences from ATSC110L to motivate your project. That said, most projects will likely fall into one of two categories:

• Revamping an existing lab: Students must change the way an existing lab is taught or presented by incorporating new materials, demonstrations, and/or experiment components. 

• Designing a new experiment: This new experiment can be added onto or replace an existing lab or experiment. Students can also choose to create a lab/experiment on a topic that was not explicitly covered in ATSC110 or ATSC110L (such as hurricanes, blizzards, etc.)

Students will create a mini-version of a lab report in a similar format to the ones in ATSC110L. In developing the required sections below, students are encouraged to use existing ATSC110 labs as guidance; however, all content submitted in the final project must be the student's original work. Students may not copy any sections directly from existing labs or use AI to develop their report/lab. 

ALL lab reports must contain the following:

• Title

• Names of all members of the group

• Purpose: In 1-3 sentences, explain what the overall goal of your lab is, such as the skills students will learn, topics that will be explored, and ways they can apply these experiences in the real world. What do you want your students to take away from your lab?

• Learning Objectives: In 1-2 sentences, explain the fundamental concepts that students will learn. What scientific concepts will students understand after completing your lab?

• Materials

• Procedure

• Additional Questions: At the end of the lab report, students must create a minimum of 3 original free-response questions related to the content of their lab report. These questions should be strongly related to the lab's purpose and learning objectives. 

  • These questions are required to be short-answer or discussion questions. Multiple choice and true/false questions do not count towards this requirement. 

If students choose to revamp an existing lab, but do not explicitly develop a new experiment or explore a new topic, they will additionally be required to include the following section:

• Improvements: At the end of the lab report, in 4-6 sentences, describe the changes you made to the lab and the reasoning behind them. How do your changes/ideas improve upon the existing lab? 

Please see the Grading Rubrics page for information on how the projects are evaluated. 

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