How does sound travel when it rounds the corner of a building? Is it possible to analyse the light from a pedestrian traffic light using tools that fit into a rucksack? How can the variation in the pitch of a car’s sound be used to reconstruct its movement?
These are not hypothetical questions taken from a physics textbook – they are questions chosen by 16 undergraduate students from Instituto Superior Técnico, Universidade de Lisboa, who are participating in a pilot project within the Laboratory of Experimental Physics curricular unit.
Developed over the 2025/2026 academic year by a dedicated committee from the Department of Physics at Técnico, under the guidance of physicist Eric Mazur from Harvard University, the curricular unit’s new approach replaces traditional instruction-based experiments with a sequence of decision-making tasks that promote student autonomy.
Students begin outside the laboratory, investigating an optical or acoustic phenomenon using measuring instruments. With the data they collected around the city, they then move to Técnico’s teaching laboratories, which were inaugurated in January this year, to tackle a technical challenge that enhances their skills in instrumentation and data analysis. Finally, they design and conduct an open-ended project of their own devising.
“We wanted to do away with the script without compromising quality standards”, explains Marco Piccardo, who led the implementation of the pilot project with Patrícia Conde Muíño. According to the professor overseeing the Laboratory of Experimental Physics curricular unit, “students must take ownership of the problem and the apparatus, while being responsible for calibration, repeatability, uncertainty and evidence”. “The most important outcome”, emphasises Marco Piccardo, “is not that the ideas work right away, but that students view failure as information and continue to refine their experiments”.
Back in the laboratory, the pilot project was divided into acoustics and optics challenges. The acoustics briefing required students to transmit a signal, detect it using microphones, and identify its Fourier components. As for the optics briefing, it required them to build a spectrometer.
The goal has been set, but the path to achieving it was not. This distinction is fundamental to the course design: in a conventional experimental course, students might follow a prescribed sequence of components, alignment procedures, and analysis steps—what one might call a ‘laboratory script’. In contrast, the Laboratory of Experimental Physics curricular unit allows different groups to choose various sources, geometries, sensors, and workflow analyses. Trainers support students by asking questions, checking feasibility, and setting technical milestones, but do not direct them towards a single ‘correct’ solution.
This was a pilot project designed as a feasibility test, rather than a controlled assessment of learning outcomes. The indicators are promising: the groups presented noticeably different solutions to the same technical briefing. Ambitious project designs emerged, and the students repeatedly demonstrated an ability to carry out independent work.
The redesigned Laboratory of Experimental Physics is scheduled to open in September 2026, as part of the curriculum for the Undergraduate Programme in Engineering Physics. Its two modules, acoustics and optics, will combine outdoor research, supervised laboratory work and open-lab sessions. Continuous assessment will emphasise autonomy, group responsibility, experimental rigour, professionalism and the quality of the reasoning underlying each decision.
