CERN HST2019 - Day 4

Today provided so much information that I feel that I can just take right back to my classroom and use first thing in September!  We started with an excellent talk from our host, Jeff Wiener, about elementary particle physics in early physics education.  His research was based on teaching 12-year old students, with no prior background in physics, the basics of particle physics and what strategies worked and which ones didn't.  He spoke a lot about the importance of avoiding misconceptions (how many science teachers have seen a textbook exaggerate the elliptical orbit of Earth to make it clear that the orbit isn't circular, even though it very nearly is, and then wonder why students think that summer is due to the Earth being soooooo much closer to the Sun instead of being caused by the tilt?), making sure students understand that in science we use models that give our currently best explanation for a phenomena, and a deliberate and careful use of scientific terminology.  Here are some links to some of Jeff's research, they are definitely worth the read!

You can find more on Jeff's research at his website at cern.ch/jeff.wiener.  

We then went for a tour of the S'Cool Lab!  This was an amazing experience where they demonstrated some of the resources that they have freely available on their website for physics teachers to use!  The mystery boxes look like a great way of introducing scientific thinking at the beginning of the course, the scattering experiment is a great hands-on activity to demonstrate Rutherford's gold foil experiment and our discovery of atomic structure, and the quadrupole ion trap is an awesome demonstration of some of the technology used in the LHC.  However, one of my favourites has to be the 3D printable Toroidal Magnet Model that is used to demonstrate the magnetic fields created inside the ATLAS experiment.  I MUST HAVE one of these for my classroom!


In the afternoon we went for a site visit to the cryogenic test facility to learn about the construction of the LHC and what goes into cooling such a massive device that runs at unbelievably high energies.

All in all, another awe-inspiring day at CERN's International High School Teacher Programme and I'm looking forward to seeing what tomorrow holds!

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