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The efficiency of students' educational activity in a physical laboratory increases if students independently assemble experimental installations and use them to study physical phenomena. This paper describes a simple installation for the manufacture of a sinusoidal grating by the holographic method. Such a grating is used in many demonstration and laboratory experiments. It is used, for example, in a simple device for making photos of optical spectra on a smartphone, and this device is also described in this paper. First, students study the elementary theory of a holographic diffraction grating. They use this theory to calculate the parameters of the installation that allows them to obtain a grating with the required period and use an experiment to verify the validity of the theory. Then they calculate the parameters of the spectroscope on the basis of the studied theory and again make sure that the theory is valid. Thus, it is possible to organize a learning process in which the theory is fully confirmed by the experiment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]