Summer Research - Outreach QuarkNet

Summer Research

Quarknet High School Activity - Maui 2016

Teacher with a group of student on Maui will study the global temperature

and find possible correlation with solar activity and cosmic rays.

 

This 2016 summer Quarknet High school activity, will take place on Maui Island.

A group of 4 students from Maui High School: Mary Chin, Princess Constantino, Laney Flanagan, Bryce Jackman with the help of their project Mentor J.D. Armstrong, and their teacher Keith Imada, will try to study if exists a connection between galactic cosmic ray, solar activity and global warming.

 

The abundance of Galactic Cosmic Ray (GCR) hitting our atmosphere is heavily affected by solar activity and its 11 year cycle. The group will study how the flux of cosmic rays at earth is affected by solar activity. Using the sun spot number, they will study how the solar activity changed during the last couple of centuries. They will study the global temperature and find if correlations with solar activity and cosmic rays exist. The project duration will be of 8 weeks for the teacher and 6 weeks for the students.

 

Students will participate at the Oahu Physics Department Open House and visit the UH physics dept labs. They will present their results and show a poster at the Maui AMS-02 workshop to be held Nov 11. Lastly they will submit their project for the 2016 Pacific Science Symposium.

Three Hawaii high school physics teachers selected by national QuarkNet program

for participation at 2016 summer workshops in the US and Greece.

           

The Hawaii Quarknet mentor Veronica Bindi, Assistant Professor at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, is pleased to announce that three high school teachers from Hawaii have been nationally selected by the Quarknet Project to participate at the Fermilab Data Camp in Illinois, and the CERN ISE workshop in Greece this July.

Duc Ong, physics teacher at Kaiser High School is among the 24 teachers selected to participate at the Data Camp in Fermilab in Batavia, IL. Data Camp is designed to be an introductory workshop for both new and veteran teachers of physics and physical science to learn about particle physics and high energy physics. Different from a traditional teacher workshop the data camp gives emphasis on an authentic data analysis experience. The teachers will receive a real dataset from the Large Hadron Collider experiment operating at CERN in Switzerland. They will work in small groups to analyze the dataset and visually interpreting event display plots similar to those used by particle physicists at CERN.

More details on the workshop are at: https://quarknet.i2u2.org/page/data-camp-2016.

Ong said: "I've done already a couple of projects involving Cosmic Ray e-Lab and QuarkNet and I'd like to learn more so that I could incorporate this better in my curriculum. As a part of the IB philosophy of internation-mindedness, I find that a collaboration of physicists from all over the world is an excellent way for my students to see this in action. Also, my MS thesis was on data from BES with Dr. Fred Harris at UH Manoa about 9 years ago, so I have some background in particle physics."

Warren Huelsnitz and Peter Grach, High school physics teachers at Kamehameha Schools and part of the Quarknet Program in Hawaii, are among the twenty physics teachers from across the United States. They will join 30 European counterparts in July to attend the Inspiring Science Education (ISE) Summer Academy in Marathon, Greece, a six-day training and networking program aimed at boosting inquiry-based learning in high school classrooms (http://ise.ea.gr/). Participants will work with digital resources from European science and teaching organizations, including lesson repositories, remote-operated telescopes and a computer simulation program called augmented reality. The National Science Foundation funded the trip through the national QuarkNet Program, an education and outreach program that partners high school physics teachers with particle physicists at more than 50 centers across the country.

“This kind of international relationship-building is a big win for QuarkNet teachers and the hundreds of students they serve,” says Mitch Wayne, professor of physics at the University of Notre Dame and one of QuarkNet’s national principal investigators. “It opens access to new resources, new models of learning, and new colleagues and collaborators in the field.”

Peter Grach's interest goes beyond just what happens in his classroom. As a QuarkNet mentor teacher, College Board - AP physics consultant, Hawai'i Departement of Education mentor teacher, and student teacher mentor, he has been always interested in tools to help all physics teachers here in Hawaii be more engaging and ultimately more effective.

Warren Huelsnitz began a life in physics after retiring from the Navy in 2006. He earned his PhD in high energy physics at the University of Maryland, while a member of the IceCube South Pole Neutrino Observatory Collaboration. That was followed up by a couple of years at Fermilab working on the MiniBooNE neutrino oscillation experiment. After conducting research in neutrino physics and neutrino astrophysics for several years, Warren turned to teaching physics to inspire the next generation of scientists and engineers.

               

Peter  Grach                                                      Duc Ong                                                    Warren Huelsnitz