University of California, Riverside
Contact Information
John Ellison
john.ellison@ucr.edu
We organized a QuarkNet workshop on August 7–8, 2008. This year's workshop was attended by seven high school teachers from the local area schools in Riverside and San Bernardino counties. The workshop was held on the last two days of a longer academy for high school teachers in which UCR Physics and Astronomy Department faculty gave lectures and held laboratory sessions on teaching methods and strategies for high school physics. This included many simple and cheap experiments that teachers could take to their classrooms, e.g. experiments based on the Optics Kit from the Optical Society of America, which we gave to all teachers. Teachers also received "clickers" for use in their classrooms.
The QuarkNet portion on August 7–8 was organized with lectures in the mornings and lab work based on the cosmic ray detector in the afternoon. The talks were given by UCR faculty and staff including John Ellison, Bob Clare, Gail Hanson (experimental HEP), Jose Wudka (Theoretical HEP), Braham Mobasher (Observational Cosmology), and Maria Chiara Simani (UCR ALPHA Center – our outreach center for math and science education in schools). They included an overview of particle physics and cosmology followed by talks on various areas of research including the LHC program, BaBar, neutrino physics and muon collider, and observational cosmology. We also had a talk form one of the experienced teachers, Mark Bonnard, on how to teach particle physics in a high school course, which led to a very nice discussion on this topic among the teachers and UCR faculty. Mark's high school class also participated in a masterclass held at UCR in March at UCR2.
In the afternoon the teachers built the cosmic ray detector (CRD) that was sent to us as a kit from Fermilab. This was aided by Kris Whelan from QuarkNet and UCR faculty John Ellison and Bob Clare. John Ellison gave a talk on cosmic rays to introduce the ideas and then the teachers built the detector and were able to take some data and look at the results on the second afternoon. All the teachers expressed interest in having their students work with the CRD. The CRD is currently at San Jacinto High School where Mark Bonnard's students will be using it before it is passed on to the next school.
We have created a web page at http://faculty.ucr.edu/~ellison/quarknet/ where all the talks from our QuarkNet workshop are linked and where we have posted useful information on operation and data analysis using the CRD. Some photographs from the workshop, including teachers assembling the CRD are shown below. All the teachers gave us positive feedback about the workshop, especially the hands-on part with the CRD, and we plan to hold another workshop next year when we hope to engage more teachers.
