Physics Practicals for Engineering Students?

Abstract

Hands-on practical work in physics and engineering has a long and well established tradition in Australian universities. Recently, however, the question of whether hands-on physics practicals are useful for engineers and whether these could be replaced by computer simulations has been raised by some university administrators mainly due to cost cutting exercises. In order to ascertain the usefulness of first year practical physics classes to their engineering degree a retrospective survey was carried out with third year engineering students. This paper reports on the results of that survey.