Reply to comment on 'Resistance of a digital voltmeter: teaching creative thinking through an inquiry-based lab'

摘要

First, we thank Gingl and Mingesz for reading our article and providing comments and suggestions. Although their error analysis is interesting [1], it is based on assumptions and on what our reported values might suggest. Even though in our article we showed one value for the voltage and one value for the current, we carefully selected the values consistent with the I versus V slope. The main point of our article is to challenge students to be creative, not to reveal to instructors how to perform experiments. The inquiry-based electronics experiment we proposed is intended to let students be creative and learn for themselves the conditions under which the use of a voltmeter will have measurable effects on the current in the circuit. As we stated, 'The idea is to observe how the measurement of the voltage affects the current in the circuit' [2]. Therefore, it was natural to mention Method 2 in which current is measured as a function of voltage. We mentioned this method without instructing one how to collect data points because we want students to be creative and come up with their own methods. We gave no details on how we performed measurements and we did not discuss experimental uncertainties.