University of Oregon
Contact Information
Raymond Frey
rayfrey@uoregon.edu
The roster of our center currently includes ten teachers. We have lost three teachers in the last two years to transfers out of state. We have made efforts to recruit new teachers via e-mail (the Oregon AAPT list) and direct contact (R. Frey talk at ORAAPT meeting) . There was interest from two community college instructors, however, they are not eligible. However, the teachers we do have on our roster are committed to the program--all have participated for multiple years; half have attended at least four years. Five of the teachers have participated in at least one of the national programs held at Fermilab.
The 2008 workshop was our seventh. It was held a bit later than usual due to the Olympic Track and Field Trials held on campus in late June. This was the third year in which the workshop activities were focused on cosmic-ray detectors based on the Fermilab design. The adoption of this design has been very positive for the program, as teachers had been frustrated in previous years by components which didn't work well and were difficult to adapt to classroom use. Teachers are enthusiastic about the cosmic ray projects now.
For the 2007 workshop, we included a second workshop element--a tour of science facilities in the San Francisco Bay Area. This included tours of SLAC, LBNL, and the Exploratorium. For 2008, we considered a tour of the LIGO Hanford Observatory. However, three of our long-time teachers were unable to participate this year due to family or medical issues, and there were no new teachers. So the mentor decided to focus on building, debugging, and doing experiments with the cosmic-ray muon detectors (CRMD). As shown on the web page, five Oregon teachers participated. An important component of the workshop was the participation of Jeff Rodriguez from Cincinnati. His expertise was crucial. The Oregon teachers now have sufficient expertise to mentor other teachers. In fact, the workshop resulted in some very nice products which are likely to be useful to the QuarkNet CRMD community. Teacher Rob Tinnell produced three documents based on his work in getting his CRMD and DAQ working. These can be found at the bottom of the 2008 Workshop web page. The first of these documents, the DAQ "cheat sheet," is especially of interest, as it pulls together the useful tidbits from various sources of existing documentation into a simple, short document. As can be seen from the web page, the 2008 workshop included a few talks on physics topics. Jim Brau gave a version of his successful public lecture on the big questions in high-energy and astroparticle physics. We had only one tour this year, the always-popular tour of the campus accelerator led by Robert Schofield. There was a talk on issues in theoretical high-energy physics by Graham Kribs. This generated a lot of discussion from teachers about how best to advise promising high school students about their interest in topics such as theoretical physics. Ray Frey and Jeff Rodriguez gave talks on cosmic ray physics and the CRMDs. We followed our tradition of having a popular session in which teachers discuss an especially interesting or successful project which they led in their classrooms during the past year, and plans for the coming year. This was led by Jeff Garland of South Eugene High School. Otherwise the teachers wanted to devote their time to CRMD work. By the end of the workshop, they had learned how to take joint data using a novel detector configuration. They seemed pleased by the progress they had made and were anxious to try out the CRMDs in their classrooms.
