Doing Field Projects

21 Winding Down and Gearing Up

Now that you have completed the projects here – or some of them at least – it is time to look back and reflect on what you have learned, as well as consider the path forward. You are ethically required to keep copies of all your field notes and findings in a safe place, so now is a good time to make sure that everything that you have recorded in the course of these projects is carefully indexed, filed, and stored permanently in a safe place, such as a thumb drive, cloud storage, or, preferably, both. Redundancy is a wise precaution. You may think of these projects as beginners’ exercises with limited merit; however, they do have value beyond their pedagogical objectives. If you worked individually with an interviewee, be sure to provide a copy of your final report or presentation to them as well.

Recall that there are major differences in the projects in this book and experiments that you have to perform for an introductory lab section in biology or chemistry or physics. The “experiments’’ in an introductory physics lab are not designed to help you overturn Newton’s laws of motion or optics. You perform them to confirm Newton (or Maxwell or whomever), and you use Newton’s formulas to calculate results. If your results do not confirm Newton, you have done something wrong and you have to conduct the experiment again until you get it right. Newton’s laws are foundational, even though they have undergone radical modification over several hundred years. ...