Modern Physics met today and spent a little more time on their particle adventure. Even though they didn’t finish, we moved on to a new activity so that we didn’t spend too much time at once buried in a website with so many new terms (and tigers and top hats!). During the particle adventure, one group spent some time talking to me about where the … Continue reading Day 8: Welcome to The Fermilab
The Modern Physics class had a board meeting to discuss the rules they came up with for how quarks combine. They also watched a couple of Physics Girl videos to give more overview of quarks and then went on a particle adventure. Both of my Physics 10 sections met today. Both classes finished the Constant Velocity Particle Model packet on paper and have only a couple of … Continue reading Day 6: Quarks, Whiteboards, and What in the world are capacitors doing?
In Modern Physics, students worked in groups and suggested improvements to the QuarkNet activity that simulated the gold foil experiment. The goal was to think of ways that we could alter the activity to make it more closely relate to the actual experiment. Then they started figuring out patterns and rules for how quarks combine with the Quark Workbench activity. Continue reading Day 5: Rutherford Upgrades and Quarks
My Modern Physics class started thinking about particle physics with the gold foil experiment. We used another QuarkNet Data Portfolio activity and simulated the experiment using marbles as the alpha particles and dice as the gold atoms. They made a histogram of hits per 10 rolls by using sticky notes on the wall, then figured out the size of the particles (the dice and marbles are … Continue reading Day 3: Starting Particle Physics
Modern Physics (for 11th/12th graders) started with a variation of a Quarknet Data Portfolio activity to learn how to make histograms and to start thinking about how they could be useful. There were multiple parts to the activity. In one part, they found sums for pairs of dice. They made histograms for their groups, but also pooled data as a class and made one big … Continue reading Day 1: Dice, Histograms, and Buggies
O'Shea Physics 180 