We are exploring how best to incorporate the exciting idea of cosmic ray detectors in high schools in the greater St. Louis area into actual learning of high school students in a natural way such that the students and high school teachers take some ownership of the project, while at the same time organizing any information received in such a way that it can be correlated with information from other sites, locally or even nationally. The physicists involved are:

Julia Thompson and Dave Kraus, Pitt and UMSL

For news of our activities, see our UMSL site

See one of the Nalta websites: (preliminary version or (later version) for some more details of other groups in North America working on similar projects.

A brief introduction, selected links, and possible high school student activities have been developed in conjunction with Ms. Julie Breden of Southwestern High School in southern Illinois.

We are working with interested teachers and undergraduates from REUPFOM at UMSL in a series of Quarknet workshops , in a wide range of possible high school teacher activities. We expect that each teacher will go back to her or his classroom as a member of a team which will share a pair of scintillators and recording system which could be used for demonstrating and studying aspects of cosmic rays with their classes. We hope also that some teachers will have a time-stamping mechanism, to allow comparison of rates and events at different participating schools.