This past summer, the Waterloo Engineering Endowment Fund (WEEF) purhased a new piece of laboratory equipment - the VERSAmax Microplate Spectrophotometer (RIGHT) - for the Civil and Environmental Engineering Departments. In addition to it's many research applications, this instrument and it's companion software program - SOFTMAX Pro will be used for laboratories conducted in the course ENV E 375.

This web-site was initiated by Professor Alan Werker, course instructor for ENV E 375, in conjunction with UW's Learning and Teaching Through Technology (LT3) centre, to introduce the instrument and its functions to students and to help them to:

• Develop of sense of how the laboratory data is generated and how it can be interpreted.
• Encourage students to critically analyse laboratory methodology, results, assumptions, and conclusions.

Thus, the main objectives of this on-line teaching/learning tool are to:

1. Familiarise students with the instrument. Specifically, how it operates and the functions it performs.
   
2. Detail how to use the instrument and companion software as a tool for laboratory activities.
3. Demonstrate how to analyse, interpret and apply data generated by the instrument.