The laboratory portion of Phys 207 is designed to offer you the flexibility to choose the work you want most to do. That is, you will be offered a package of standard lab write-ups - and, if you want to, you may simply work through these (only a few are required); however, you may choose to work on some subset of these (extending them in ways that are of interest to you). Some of you may wish to look through journals, to find experiments that you would like to reproduce or apparatus to build. Lest you feel intimidated at the thought of trying something new, please note that you will not be graded on the basis of "accomplishment" (in the sense that you need not get a value for, say, Planck's constant that is within 1% of the accepted value), but only on whether your lab notebook contains regular and clear entries showing evidence of thought and analysis.
Your lab notebooks are graded each week and are due every Saturday morning, by 9 am. If you choose not to do your lab work during a given week, you get a zero for that week. If you are in lab, but merely forget to turn in your notebook, there would be a strong penalty associated with that, but partial credit would be given - at the end of the term when I look back over the entire book.