Workshop Details - Fall 2002 meeting of ISAAPT

This workshop will be held from 9:00 am to noon on Friday, Oct. 10 in Moulton 309.

Workshop W1. “Cosmic Ray Detection Network”, Julia A. Thompson, Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Pittsburgh and Department of Physics, SIUE. Co-presenters David Kraus, University of Pittsburgh and UMSL; Elisabeth Langford, Southeast HS, Springfield; Mark Godwin, South Carolina Governor's School of Science and Mathematics; and Steven Grosland, Glenbrook South High School.

Several sites around the country are developing curricular units and detectors around the collaborative detection of cosmic rays from high-energy cosmic ray showers at cooperating high school sites. There is long-shot scientific interest in this as a way of identifying and studying extremely rare and extremely high-energy cosmic rays entering our atmosphere. These ultra-high-energy cosmic rays (UHECR) appear to occur more frequently than seems reasonable on the basis of models of their creation and propagation through the atmosphere. Because they are so rare, it is important to detect as much information about them as possible whenever they occur; thus the idea of distributed high school networks was born.

This workshop will review the current sites now working, and the basic science (particle physics, particle energy losses in passing through materials, and detection techniques) involved, as well as discussing some possible investigations for high school students involved in this project. In addition to computer web-based work, there will be presentations from teachers who worked this summer on a beginning project at the University of Missouri at St. Louis (funded jointly by the QUARKNET program and the NSF Research Experiences for Teachers program). There will be a small equipment demonstration/exploration component, and plans for the future, including a 3-week workshop in summer 2004, will also be discussed. If there is sufficient interest, a more detailed follow-on workshop may be given at the spring ISAAPT meeting.

This workshop will be held from 9:00 am to noon on Friday, Oct. 10 in Moulton 203.

Workshop W2. "Simple Experiments in Physics", Thomas Kuhn, Midwest Educational Representative, PASCO Scientific.

High school teachers participate in hands-on laboratory activities doing experiments that can be done in a high school science lab. PASCO will provide apparatus, interfaces and sensors to do the following:

Measure the Speed of Sound
Measure g
Verify Newton's 2nd Law
Find Time of Flight for Projectiles
Measure Induction
See Doppler Rocket in Action
Use Visual Accelerometer
Show Conservation of Momentum
Verify Conservation of Mechanical Energy
Look at Diffraction of Light by a Single Slit
Measure Period of a Simple Pendulum

The purpose of this workshop is to provide teachers with information and experiences that will allow them to conduct inquiry-oriented laboratory activities in their classrooms.

This workshop will be held from 10:00 am to noon on Friday, Oct. 10 in Moulton 307-C.

Workshop W3. "What's a Good Question... for motivating learning or checking understanding in highly interactive lectures?", Fred Hartline, Division of Educational Programs, Argonne National Laboratory.

In this workshop we'll discuss the ups and downs of interactive questioning, learn (and share) questioning "tricks-of-the-trade", try out some methods for "collecting" answers anonymously ("voting cards", and CPS hardware), and work together to produce a small collection of first-rate questions for you to try in your own class(es). Whether you've heard of "peer instruction" or not, you'll appreciate the change in student attention and interest in your courses that you'll get with a few well conceived in-class questions that everyone answers, AND you'll be delighted to find out whether they understood what you've taught BEFORE the next test! (Fred was the co-inventor of the Classtalk (R) classroom participation system used by Eric Mazur at Harvard, among others, during the early days of "peer instruction.").