2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

The engineering physics program at The University includes an electronics course for 2nd-year students. This course uses a project based curriculum. Students complete ten directed laboratory projects and a final comprehensive project at the end of the semester. Students must maintain laboratory manuals for each activity. The program requires the use of the Python scripting language throughout upper division coursework. The department is changing its curriculum to introduce coding in the 1st-year physics sequence. To reinforce these skills, the electronics course will introduce the use of Jupyter Notebooks (JN) as the laboratory notebook format. A JN is a web-based platform that allows students to create cells of code or text. Text cells provide a platform for students to describe the what, why, and how of their measurements. Code cells can run python (or many other programming languages) code. This allows students to use python code to complete initial analysis of data and to perform calculations related to the implementation of the activity. This paper will discuss a number of issues associated with the use of JN as the laboratory notebook. Student preparation prior to the class and their mastery at the end will be discussed along with the implementation of this approach. This is a work in progress.