Against the backdrop of digital education, the "Emerging Engineering" initiative calls on university physics-lab courses to shift their objectives from traditional knowledge transmission to the cultivation of scientific literacy, hands-on innovation, and engineering thinking. Yet current instruction is typically delivered in the first year with a strong general-education focus, lacking the distinctive features demanded by "Emerging Engineering." Students therefore arrive with insufficient theoretical preparation, low learning efficiency, and weak self-directed learning skills, making it hard to meet the talent-development goals of the initiative. To address this, we have designed and implemented a blended online-offline instructional model for the "Emerging Engineering" university physics laboratory. Leveraging an online platform, the model provides teacher-recorded lectures, experimental-operation videos, interactive virtual simulations, and targeted pre-lab quizzes that guide students to build the necessary knowledge before class. During the face-to-face sessions, emphasis is placed on standard operating procedures, observation of phenomena, data collection, and analytical inquiry, markedly improving practical skills and experimental efficiency. By combining common core experiments with distinctive, discipline-crossing ones, the model broadens students' horizons and strengthens their interdisciplinary competence. Practical results show that the model is highly effective: students' pre-lab preparation, experimental efficiency, and data-analysis abilities all improve significantly. The design and implementation process offer a replicable pathway for deepening the reform of university physics-lab teaching under the "Emerging Engineering" paradigm.

Lenses are common components in optical experiments and are essential in imaging systems. However, with the development of new optical imaging technologies such as integrated imaging, traditional optical lenses face challenges in miniaturization and integration due to their large size. In recent years, meta-lenses, as planar optical elements, can manipulate light in terms of polarization, amplitude, phase, and other aspects by designing sub-wavelength units. These unique optical properties have also made meta-lenses a hot topic in the field of micro-nano optics in recent years. To inspire students’ interest in researching cutting-edge topics, this paper introduces the working principle of meta-lenses and designs a converging electromagnetic meta-lens. Through numerical simulation and experimental characterization, the focusing performance and anomalous dispersion characteristics of the meta-lens are validated, helping students to better understand meta-lenses and promoting the integration of teaching and research.

As one of the most basic optical elements, lens is the crucial content in the courses of basic optics and information optics. However, due to the limitation of class hours and other reasons, the introduction of lens in the existing optics courses is limited to geometric lens. With the development of micro-nano optics, metalenses composed of sub-wavelength structures have been widely studied and applied due to their unique properties. To this end, introducing the frontier knowledge of metalens development into the optics course is beneficial to stimulate the students' interest to study and explore the mysteries of micro-nano optics, and thus make positive contributions to promoting the integration of teaching and research. In this paper, taking the optical design of a polarization-insensitive metalens as an example, we investigate the light propagation of that a plane waves passes through the metalens and show the focusing field distribution based on FDTD method. First, full-wave simulations of cylindrical sub-wavelength gratings with different diameters are carried out to obtain the phase information. With the phase values, the nanopillars are selected as the structure cells of the metalens, and are arranged to achieve the whole metalens according to the phase distribution of the ideal focusing. Further, the light field distributions of that a plane wave passes through the metalens are obtained by FDTD method. Finally, the focusing field distributions are analyzed and summarized.

The research of rectangular metal waveguide modes is the key content of advanced optics and electrodynamics courses. In most of the existing college physics textbooks, the intrinsic electromagnetic field distribution of rectangular metal waveguide mode is obtained through formula derivation, while undergraduates lack intuitive perception of electromagnetic field distribution during the learning process. In this paper, the near-field electromagnetic scanning system is used to obtain the image of rectangular metal waveguide modes. Firstly, we measured the transmission coefficient of the rectangular metal waveguide and characterized the cutoff frequency of the waveguide modes. The electric field distribution of waveguide modes with different frequency was measured, and the experimental results were compared with the theoretical and numerical simulation results. The experimental results reflect the electromagnetic field distribution of the eigenmode vividly, which is helpful for students to understand and master the characteristics of the rectangular metal waveguide mode.