Transforming an advanced physics lab course

Over the course of this semester, I am taking over the advanced physics lab course at our Institute of Physics at Goethe University Frankfurt. This task comes with certain responsibilities such as holding the introductory session, doing some paperwork and communicating with students as well as the supervisors of the individual experiments, but it also offers me the chance to renew and transform the overall structure of the course as well as selected experiments. 

I believe that the advanced lab course, which is typically taken by B.Sc. students (Bachelor of Science) in their fifth semester as well as M.Sc. (Master of Science) students, is of paramount importance for all future physicists because of the following three reasons: 

Key messages of a short conference presentation on physics education

What sort of messages do I want to convey in a ten-minute presentation? I have started thinking about this question due to my upcoming talk at the March Meeting of the American Physical Society in Las Vegas. For the first time in my life, I will give a conference presentation on an education-related topic instead of rather technical condensed matter physics contents. Since the presentation time is so short, I think that it is worth spending some time to think about the key messages. In my talk I will focus on the incorporation of computational methods into physics courses by discussing a successful realization of micromagnetic simulation group projects in an elective magnetism class at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, together with Professor Axel Hoffmann.