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Data Activities Portfolio

The Data Portfolio is a compendium of particle physics classroom activities organized by data strand and level of student engagement. Follow the links provided for information about using the Data Portfolio to plan your students’ experience. Level descriptions explain the data analysis skills that students apply at each level: tasks in Level 0 are simpler than those in Levels 1 and 2. While each level can be explored individually, students who start in one level and progress to more complex levels experience increasingly engaging and challenging tasks. These activities are aligned with NGSS Standards, particularly NGSS Practices.

Your students can follow a path through activities in a data strand to better understand practices that lead to discovery. Each pathway provides connections between topics routinely covered in physics class and particle physics content and methods. Use the pulldown menus (Curriculum Topics and Strand) to find activities related to the content you are currently covering. Watch this screencast to learn more about sorting these activities.

We want your feedback on how the activities worked for you. Please complete the survey to help us improve our activities.

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Activity Name Data Strand Level Curriculum Topics NGSS Practices
Making it ‘Round the Bend - Qualitative

Students explore the effects of electric and magnetic fields on particles. 

LHC Level 1 Electricity & Magnetism, Kinematics 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 7
Rolling with Rutherford

Students use statistics to make an indirect measurement they can easily confirm.

Cosmic Ray, LHC Level 1 Nature of Matter, Skill: Developing Models, Skill: Histograms, Skill: Uncertainty 1, 3, 4, 5, 7
Calculate the Z Mass

Students use conservation laws and vector addition to calculate the Z mass from event displays.

LHC Level 1 Conservation Laws, Nature of Matter, Special Relativity, Standard Model, Skill: Developing Models, Skill: Uncertainty 1, 2, 4, 5, 7, 8
Calculate the Top Quark Mass

Students use conservation laws and vector addition to calculate the top mass from event displays.

Cosmic Ray, LHC Level 1 Conservation Laws, Special Relativity, Standard Model, Skill: Uncertainty 1, 4, 5, 7
Signal and Noise: Cosmic Muons

In this introductory tutorial that, students learn about how to distinguish muon signals from background and instrumental noise.

Cosmic Ray Level 1 Instrumentation, Waves & Interference, Quantum Mechanics, Skill: Histograms, Skill: Uncertainty 4, 5, 6, 7, 8
Mean Lifetime Part 1: Dice

Rolling dice serves as the model for decaying particles.

Cosmic Ray, LHC Level 1 Half-Life/Mean Lifetime, Skill: Developing Models, Skill: Histograms 2, 4, 5, 7
The Case of the Hidden Neutrino

Students use momentum conservation to examine the decay of top-antitop pairs to determine what is missing from the event.

LHC, Neutrino Level 1 Conservation Laws, Special Relativity, Standard Model, Skill: Developing Models, Skill: Uncertainty 2, 4, 5, 6, 7
What Heisenberg Knew

Heisenberg knew that, at the quantum level, we cannot know everything, at least not all at once. Students explore uncertainties in measurements of complimentary variables to find this out for themselves.

Neutrino Level 1 Kinematics, Quantum Mechanics, Skill: Developing Models, Skill: Graphing 2, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8
Histograms: Uncertainty

Students construct histograms, identify the best value to represent the data, and report the uncertainty in their answers. 

Cosmic Ray, LHC, Neutrino Level 1 Skill: Developing Models, Skill: Histograms, Skill: Uncertainty 4, 5
Energy, Momentum, and Mass

Students examine data to find how energy, momentum, and mass are related.

Cosmic Ray, LHC, Neutrino Level 1 Conservation Laws, Electricity & Magnetism, Special Relativity, Skill: Developing Models, Skill: Graphing 2, 4, 5, 7, 8
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National Science Foundation
University of Notre Dame
Fermilab
Department of Energy

This project is supported in part by the National Science Foundation and by the Office of High Energy Physics, Office of Science, U.S. Department of Energy through its support of Fermilab. Opinions expressed are those of the authors and not necessarily those of the Foundation or Department.

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