The Hydraulic Analogues of Basic Circuits: Labs for Online Learning Environments

Abstract: In this paper we describe a couple of exercises that we developed for our online first-year EM course. The labs that we describe are focused on basic concepts from circuit analysis, namely Ohm's law and charging a capacitor with a constant voltage source and a series resistor. To give students a visual demonstration of these concepts and, simultaneously, provide a means for students to collect their own unique dataset, hydraulic analogues of these electric circuits were built and a series of videos were recorded. Incidentally, the visual demonstrations may also help to alleviate some of the commonly-held student misconceptions about basic circuits. For this reason, even once in-person labs resume, we expect that the hydraulic analogue demonstrations will continue to be useful.