PhysMoVan SAFRICA Physics Festival

              June 10, 2002
            Science Building, SIUE

  In July and August, teams from the US will be
travelling to Johannesburg and Cape Town in South 
Africa, working on high school physics outreach
with local schools there.  On June 10,  at SIUE,
we are having a rehearsal. Come suggest improvements?

I. 11:00 (11:30?) Room 0225 middle school teachers intro  

II. 12:00-1:00 Room 0117 Dr. Jeremy Dodd, ATLAS experiment
        "MYSTERY MATTER, HIDDEN DIMENSIONS and a 
                 THEORY OF EVERYTHING?"
        Dr. Dodd will discuss how the LHC (Large Hadron
        Collider) accelerator now under construction at
        CERN (Large international elementary particle 
        physics lab in Geneva, Switzerland) will help
        to answer these questions.  (all science students
        and teachers are invited).

III. 1-3pm. preparations (with help from Jim Votsmeier,
        SIUE physics lab manager)
  

 Note: IV, V, and VI are roughly, but not entirely,in parallel.

IV. 3-6pm. Room 1217 (check #) "Exploratorium"
        (because we hope, in a small way, to imitate
        the famous San Francisco Exploratorium),
        These are neat demonstrations, with some 
        (supervised) individual hands on inquiry possible. 
        
   A. optics:   
    holograms
    crossed polarizers (rotate middle one, etc)
    virtual images with diverging lenses
    parabolic focussing mirros (sound, light, heat.. match, etc).
    uv light (to show fluoresence)

   B. electricity:
    generator to show motion -> electricity
    van de graaf generator
    cathode  ray tube

   C. mechanics:
    gyroscopes (gravitational precession, etc.
    angular momenta (spinning stool, bicycle wheel, etc)
    large bowling ball pendulum (or mockup imitation)
    coupled springs/pendulums
    "visiting see saw"... levers

   D. other:
      magdeburg hemispheres
      sound wave  interference?
   
V. 3-6 pm. 0335 Hands on activity: Light scattering, 
      used to infer (figure out) the structure of 
      material (things). Slinkies, lasers, slits.
      Measure the the size of your hair! This lab
      (if all the math is exploited) can be at the 
      level of high school seniors, but (skipping
      much of the math) can be done with middle school
      or younger students, more as a "see what neat 
      thing happens" experiment. 

VI. 4-6 pm. 0117 

    A. Mockup (with real equipment) of Cerenkov counters
      donated by a physics experiment at Brookhaven National
      Laboratory.  What is Cerenkov radiation? How
      were the mirrors built? How was the radiation
      detected?  What did  the experiment do anyway?

    B. Hands on activity: Electricity: Parallel and 
       series resistor circuits. batteries, 4 nearly
       identical resistors, meters.  This lab will 
       be done with high school juniors or seniors.
       Since the resistors are nearly identical, much
       of the main results are accessible with simple
       math, and can be used with younger students.

    C.  Hands on activity: Collisions:  What are the 
       consequences from Newton's third law for 
       car manufacturer's or government or individual
       decisions concerning the weight and physical
       size of the cars we drive?  What is physics?
       What is force?  What is Newton's third law?
       What is acceleration?  What is mass? How are
       force, mass, and acceleration connected?  This
       lab has been done with 9th graders with no prior
       formal knowledge of physics.