Abstract
Interactive Physics Laboratory (IPL) is an educational laboratory intended mostly for upper secondary students. Its goal is to provide the students a place where they can conduct physics experiments in the form of structured inquiry.
Students visit the laboratory with their teacher in groups of up to 16 and spend 120 minutes there under the supervision of two lecturers. The students are led to maximal autonomy - they perform all of the activities independently, including preparing measurements, recording and evaluating data.
Nowadays, the IPL offers nine experimental sets, each of which consists of four to six experimental units. Every unit has its own worksheet, which is given to the students to record their results.
The units and the worksheets are prepared in various forms to focus not only on development of conceptual understanding, but also on gaining specific experimental and scientific skills. Among other things, students meet video analysis and analysis of a photo, they use applets to simulate different physics phenomena, learn how to formulate a hypothesis, predict results of experiments and explain and verify these predictions.
Furthermore, at the end of each IPL visit, each workgroup describes one of the experimental units in a presentation lasting a few minutes, including major findings and results.