This Week in Photos: Virtual Lab Partners
February 25, 2021
Yvonne Gay
![A student stares at a laptop screen.](https://www.oberlin.edu/sites/default/files/styles/width_760/public/content/news/images-2021/virtualpartners1.yvonne_gay.jpg?itok=v-HbT0wu)
In this week’s photo series we stop by Wright Laboratory of Physics and visit a class with a cool take on how students work with 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.
![A physics lab room.](/sites/default/files/content/news/images-2021/virtualpartner6.yvonnegay.jpg)
![A male student uses a light on his cell phone to look into a sandbox.](/sites/default/files/content/news/images-2021/virtualpartners2.yvonnegay.jpg)
![A girl works at a lab table with another student on a monitor.](/sites/default/files/content/news/images-2021/virtualpartner3.yvonnegay.jpg)
![A girl holds a small metal ball over a sandbox](/sites/default/files/content/news/images-2021/sandboxdrop.yvonnegayjpg.jpg)
![A student kneels next to a sandbox in a physics lab.](/sites/default/files/content/news/images-2021/virtualpartners4.yvonnegay.jpg)
![A teacher sits at a computer in front of a chalkboard.](/sites/default/files/content/news/images-2021/virtualpartners7.yvonnegay.jpg)
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