Interactive Physics Laboratory
Welcome to the website of the Interactive Physics Laboratory (IPL, the Czech abbreviation IFL), which is managed by the Department of Physics Education, Faculty of Mathematics and Physics, Charles University in Prague. The IPL is a place where we enable high school students to grasp physics with their own hands. We do not offer a show, we prepare conditions for students’ own experimenting in physics.
Organisational and technical information
About the project
The birth of the laboratory
The idea to establish a laboratory intended primarily for high school students at the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics was inspired by the House of Science in Stockholm, which – unlike IPL – focuses on not only physics experiments, but experimenting in science generally. With the support of the Faculty, the laboratory was opened in December 2008.
Our goals
The goal of the IPL is to provide high school students (resp. their teachers) a space for conducting physics experiments which could be hardly carried out in the classroom because of their time or equipment demands. Students play a major role – they conduct all the experiments with their own hands, prepare measurements, record and evaluate data and at the end briefly present their results to their classmates. For the whole time in the laboratory, students can consult their steps with lecturers, whose role is however only supportive – students are led to maximal autonomy. We believe this way we can help students to significantly deepen their physics insight as well as manual skills.
Support
The development of the laboratory was substantially supported by the Physics Section of the MFF UK and the Fund for the Development of Universities (FRVŠ). Since 2011, the IPL activities have been supported by institutional development projects funded by the Ministry of Education. Thank you!
