This Week in Photos: Virtual Lab Partners

Laura DeGroot’s Physics 103 class is chattering. Not because students aren’t engaged in their work—quite the opposite. Everyone is busy interacting with their virtual partners, a component in labs that the pandemic has caused many professors to creatively reshape. 

On this day, four students sit at tables with monitors displaying their classmates across from them. A small plastic container with sand sits on the floor, and a tall measuring stick, clamped to the table, hovers inches above the box. After leveling the sand with a few bangs and shakes, a small sphere is held at a certain distance and dropped. Measurements are taken to determine how far the sphere traveled into the sand.