I am Muhammad Sabieh Anwar from Physics, Syed Babar Ali School of Science and Engineering. Here I will update the progression of the course ENGG100 for my sections. This course is offered n Fall 2025. This webpage is a diary of what is happening in the course, I will update this as we go along. The diary is best viewed in tandem with the course webpage which is here.
Table of Contents
Scientific Computing
We begin with scientific computing. The Physics Laboratory is a rich source of quantitative data. We always need the means to gather this data, process and present it. Inferences need to be drawn. The data on its own harbors great meaning, but this meaning has to be unleashed. In the first two weeks, we will develop the skills needed to use a computer to process this data. Week 1 will be devoted to Matlab produced by Mathworks, while week 2 covers computing with the open source language Python. We will split the sections into groups of 20 and deal with 20 students at a time.
- Presentation on scientific computing with Matlab prepared by Dr. Hamza Humayun
- Another important resource on data processing with Matlab prepared by Amrozia Shaheen and Dr. Sabieh Anwar (2017).
- Assignment 1 Monday group week 1: Computing with Matlab
- Assignment 1 Thursday group week 1: Computing with Matlab (II)
- Check out these resources on Khan Academy if you want to know what is a matrix.
- Presentation on scientific computing with Python developed by Dr. Hamza Humyun.
- Do check our resources on the Astrolab page that has a collection of four Jupyter notebooks that walk you through basics of Python.
- Your homework for week 2, applicable both to Monday and Thursday sections is here and it uses this data.
- Assignment 3, applicable to both Monday and Thursday sections: Uncertainties and Data Processing
Uncertainties and optimization
In the second module, after gaining some felicity with computing, we will begin to look at some clever and scientifically accurate ways of analyzing data in a rigorous, systematic fashion. We will spend about two more weeks on this aspect. The first week will be a lecture followed by a homework. The second week, we will have a real lab-sized activity that exposes you to data gathering from a real experiment and subsequent analysis.
- A Jupyter notebook can be found here that we used in class to talk about types of uncertainties, meaning of standard deviation and its difference from standard error, followed by confidence intervals.
- To assist with data analysis, here is an accompanying document that contains a useful formula cheat sheet and sample questions which we in fact tried to solve in class. Don’t forget to browse through the resources on the Lab-1 page.
- At the end of this section, is a Youtube recording of Dr. Sabieh Anwar’s expository session on uncertainties (dated 15 September 2025).
- We ended the second module with a week spent on a laboratory activity investigating the properties of a light bulb—created by Dr. Sabieh Anwar and his team for the Phenomenon Lab. The experiment had three parts (a) does the bulb obey Ohm’s law, (b) can we find the bulb filament’s temperature and (c) does the light obey an inverse square law with distance? Also see a pertinent experiment on the PhysLab page. The data generated is a rich source for practising plotting, curve fitting, looking at uncertainties and interpretation. That was after all the whole point of this.
Video tracking
The third module deals with video tracking, which is a technique of employing a camera and videos therefrom allowing us to extract positional trajectories using some software. These trajectories are signatures of kinematic processes, physical phenomena, evolving shapes etc. With the help of the software, we can then extract angles, speeds, acceleration both in the linear and rotational dimensions. The software we employ is called PhysTrack (which is built upon Matlab) and we have out some of relevant ideas into the “Smart Physics” section of PhysLab. The homework this week asked students to submit a demonstrative piece of work illustrating teh use of video tracking.
Electronic circuits
Analyzing, designing and building electronic circuits are an integral component of the Measurement and Design Lab. For this purpose, the fourth module which spans over two weeks, has been specifically designed for enabling students to go through the cycle of simulating circuits and then subsequently building them, and in the processing learning about soldering and stuffing boards with circuit components. They will also recognize what different circuit components look like, their nodes and means for making connections thereto. For simulation, we will use the open source Spice tool called LT Spice. Each student will get one of the to work on one of the following circuits:
Dual-output waveform generator- Pulse oximeter
- Colpitt’s oscillator
- Action potential synthesizer
- Chua’s circuit
- ECG simulator
In the second week of this activity, students made real circuits, building them bottom up on a strip board from provided circuit diagrams, then then soldered the connections and tested output waveforms on a digital oscilloscope. Pretty fun!
Computer-aided design and additive printing
This is the fifth module of the ENGG100 course. Students were asked to design one of four compliant mechanisms (bodies that flex to achieve a particular task) including a bistable switch, a plier, an Euler catapult and a surgical gripper. They learned the principles of computer-aided design, and subsequently converting these designs to machine readable files for a 3D printer, in our case the Markhor3D developed by M3D, a spin-off from PhysLab itself. Here is the flowchart of the process followed.
Faisal Saeed and other lab instructors initiated the activity through a concise presentation that covered examples of CAD, engineering drawing, steps involved in additive printing, slicing G-codes while employing open source tools such as Onshape, Cura Slicer and Pronterface. It appears that the students felt immersed in creating their devices.
Data acquisition
An integral component of the modern laboratory is acquiring data (physical, chemical, biological signals) from the real world and inputting into the computer for subsequent analysis. On the other side, actuation and control of equipment requires data from the computer to be output to the external world. This two-way communication is an essential ingredient for the metrological and physics laboratories. Hence in the sixth module, employing PhysLogger developed by Qosain Scientific, students are able to generate a sinusoidal wave, feed into an RC circuit, and acquire signals across the resistor (or the capacitor). Through a sequence of steps outlined in our corresponding think-aloud activity, students are able to measure a parameter, in this case, estimate the resistance.
Experimental Activity
This is the last phase of the course. Students are assigned experiments from the Lab-1 retinue. They work in pairs and grading is done at the end of the day according to the provided rubric. The idea behind the experimental activity module is to provide students access to real experimental work in a holistic sense where they can test and exploit and also discover their experimental capabilities while combining the skills in circuits, simulation, data processing and design. Furthermore five groups were invited to participate in the Physics Studio track which aims at designing new experimental investigations in measurement and design while probing physical phenomena. This year, the five questions that were posed to students undertaking Physics Studio included the following.
| What if we periodically interrupt the swing of a simple pendulum? | Annia Bilal, Hibah Faisal, Huzaifa Shehzad and Muhammad Salman Hassan |
| Investigate the properties of a series of mutually repelling disc magnets and how they oscillate? | Maham Faisal, Huzaifa Imran and Syed Ramis Hussain Zaidi |
| How does a cylinder roll down a V shaped track—the so-called Galileo oscillator? | Aiza Akhtar Chaudhry, Ayan Khan and Ibrahim Saghir |
| How do the speeds and accelerations of balls rolling down an inclined plane compare? | Khadija Zaidi, Muhammad Abdul Moiz Khan and Muhammad Anas Chadhary |
| How does water discharge from a tank? Deeper dive into the dynamics. Does it show universal behavior? | Sarosh Naveed and Zarwa Maryam Waqar |
