Here is a brief summary of the masterclass in Mainz, which was very successful. A group of 12 high school students in 9-12th grade plus one teacher participated. All students had heard a lecture before on particle physics in our Saturday Morning Physics series, so they had unusual background knowledge on the constituents of matter. Some of the students were very bright: Êone Òmensa international memberÓ student arrived from a town 500 km away and stayed at our house for two nights!
We started with the icebreaker activity using the prepared Òparticle cardsÓ, which I had simplified by e.g. listing the particle masses as multiples of the proton mass. We did not spend overly much time on this, but were lucky that one female student (ÒelectronÓ) sat right next to a male Òanti-electronÓ. Clear that we had a lively discussion on what would happen if they came too close to each other ...
Afterwards, I started with my first introductory talk on particles, radioactivity and its connection to cosmic rays and neutrinos. This was accompanied by hands-on experiments with 8 cloud chambers. This worked out very well; we also had a few radioactive samples (glass perls, Êgas mantle, thorium enrich soldering rod, a piece of concrete) which we checked out with a Geiger Counter and afterwards with a smart phone app. ÊWe introduced this while waiting for the cloud chambers to be in a ready state. Only the gas mantle gave a significant rate increase with the smart phone app. The students liked this very much, they had a lot of fun with the dry ice and producing Òsmoking drinksÓ with it (it was unusually hot yesterday É). ÊI then gave an introductory talk to IceCube and the physics phenomena that lead to particle detection in the ice.
After that, my student went to lunch with the high school students ( 1 hour). We then started with the computer exercises . I think that this went very well,Ê many students repeated the tests several times until they their results were Òalways correctÓ. ÊAll students had a hard time picking out the highest energy events, which was actually instructive. They also had problems with defining whether events were in the veto (sometimes the lowest DOM was marked in purple, sometimes not and it was not clear why some of the events should be contained). Again, this difficulty led to helpful discussions.
We interrupted the computer exercises for an afternoon Òcoffee, cake and strawberryÓ break during which we showed movies of our students from the pole plus the Òconstruction movieÓ by Jim. The relaxed atmosphere was very much appreciated.
We then left for the computer room for a second time and did the Òpoint source ÊanalysisÓ. This went fine too, although it was noticeable that the concentration of some of the students wasnÕt quite at the level of the morning. ÊWe spend some time to introduce the concept of a probability and a probability density; here a little more time would have been good. The only exercise we did not do was the combined energy / angle display, which would have been too much for the day as we had to leave for the video conference.
The students really liked the live connection to the Pole and the discussions with Brussels afterwards. Unfortunately, most were too shy to speakÊ out (in English or French) in the Òreal situationÓ.
In summary, I think that the master class was very successful, in particular when considering that this was the first test of its various elements. Next time we would rather start half an hour earlier (i.e. at 9 m) to have some more time for discussion on new concepts (e.g. logarithmic scales on plots, the meaning of probabilities etc). However, much more content would have been too much to keep the required concentration level. We also think that the combination with Òhands-onÓ experiments at the beginning was a big success, showing that physics is mostly experimental after all.
So thanks for all the hard work preparing the exercises and materials!
Ê
Cheers, Lutz