As the world begins to emerge from the pandemic, the Virginia Tech QuarkNet Center’s 2022 was also a bit of a revival!

Short URL for this page: https://tinyurl.com/vtqn2022

June 27, 2022

Connect with SUNY-Stony Brook for join QuarkNet Re-introduction

2021 was a bit of a revival for our Center at Virginia Tech!  After missing our workshop in summer 2020 due to the coronavirus pandemic, we were thankfully able to meet again (though virtually) in early August just before the school year started for the local school systems. 

Short URL for this page: http://tiny.cc/vtqn2021.

The Virginia Tech QuarkNet center meets August 2-4. Here are some details...

Documents, Links, and Forms:

The year 2020 has its effect on the Virginia Tech center as it did for so many other groups and events.  As the lead teachers and the center member teachers were expected to participate in online training at their respective school dis

The year 2019 was another successful year for the Virginia Tech QuarkNet Center!  Our annual summer workshop: “Catching Gravitational Waves” focused on QuarkNet’s LIGO eLab.  Many of our center teachers teach not only physics, but

The Virginia Tech QuarkNET group has currently 2 leading teachers, and three members that are also high school teachers. Rebecca Jaronski and Nick Merrill both organized the workshop this year, unfortunately Nick had a job offer in Georgia and has to leave. Thank you Nick for the great work and we will welcome you anytime back. Rob Culbertson, a new member, had step in as a leading teacher to help Rebecca with our center activities.

The Virginia Tech Center's first workshop concluded with a Cosmic Ray eLab poster presentation as well as an opportunity for the teachers to browse the Data Portfolio and start to plan how they could use these activities in their own classrooms.

All of the teachers see possibilities to use activities such as the Penny Mass Histogram Lab for teaching introductory science topics, such as scientific method.

Plans were discussed to use the ZBoson and TopQuark Mass activities, the Quark Workbench, and the Cosmic Ray eLab in physics classes sprinkled in various places in the curriculum of our physics teachers. One of the teachers teaches IB Physics, and is particularly excited to use some of these activities as long term projects.

The Data Portfolio activities can also be applied to chemistry, astronomy, biology and earth science classrooms. Our teachers in these fields are planning on implementing Rolling with Rutherford and modifying it to also simulate the gold foil experiment, using the Dice Probability Lab to model genetic probabilities, Muon Lifetime can be used in chemistry and earth science to model half-life and radioactive dating and decay, LIGO eLab and Cosmic Ray eLab can be used in astonomy as well as earth science!

Our planned next workshop will be at the end of July (27 and 28); the teachers will have time at this brief workshop to flesh out their lesson plans involving all these Data Portfolio activities! We look forward to hearing how these lessons work out in their classrooms.

*NEW* Link to pictures taken during our VT QuarkNet Workshop!

Agenda

Wednesday June 7: Introduction to QuarkNet and Cosmic Rays

Thursday 8 June: Detector Commissioning and Research

Friday 9 June: Research and Experiments

Saturday 10 June: Pull it all together

Resources

• QuarkNet
• Handout: 2 kinds of QuarkNet login
• Cosmic Ray e-Lab
• Virginia Tech Physics
• KURF
• VT Mobile Neutrino Lab (symmetry article)
• CUORE event display
• How cosmic rays help us understand the universe (Ted)
• Cosmic ray mystery solved (Sixty Symbols)
• Higgs in cosmic rays (original paper)
• Particle Adventure
• Large Hadron rap

Contacts

• Camillo Mariani (VT QuarkNet mentor)
• Rebecca Jaronski (VT QuarkNet lead teacher)
• Nick Merrill (VT QuarkNet lead teacher)
• Ken Cecire (QuarkNet staff)