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High
School Physics Teachers Get Help From Pomona
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On February 26, Pomona College will host its third annual
Physics Teacher Workshop providing Southern California high
school physics teachers with updates on advances in physics
and hands-on experiments designed to meet the time and
budgetary constraints of a typical high school.
Focusing on “Electrons in Circuits,” with an emphasis on
electronics in consumer products, the program includes “Too
Cool to Resist,” a demonstration exploring
superconductivity, and two hands-on activities.
• The "Water Circuit Lab" is a classroom activity designed
to teach the properties of electric circuits such as
current, potential, resistance and the relationships between
them. Water circuits provide an excellent comparison to
simple electric circuits, but few students have experience
with fluid dynamics. This lab allows a hands-on
investigation of water flow, including current, pressure and
resistance, in series and parallel arrangements, which can
be related to electric current, potential and electric
resistance.
• The "Ohm’s Law Lab" is a classroom activity to determine
the relationship between voltage, resistance and amperage.
In this activity, students are led through a series of
readings and short experiments leading to the task of
determining the relationship between voltage, resistance and
amperage. In the end, they are asked to design their own
experiment to determine this relationship given several
different voltage sources and a constant resistance. By
numerical and graphic analysis, students derive Ohm’s law
and test their derivation on a resistor of unknown
resistance.
According to David Tanenbaum, an associate professor of
physics at Pomona College, “Most students get their first
introduction to physics in high school classrooms, and we
realize that many high school teachers have only minimal
budgets and facilities. Our goal is to excite teachers and
give them additional tools to excite their students. We hope
the hands-on experiments will do that.”
The 2005 Pomona workshop is co-sponsored by Pomona College,
the CNS Institute for Physics Teachers and the National
Science Foundation. It will be held at the Pomona College
Millikin Laboratory, 610 N. College Ave., Claremont, from 9
a.m. to 3:30 p.m. For a more detailed schedule, call (909)
621-8724.
For the first time, Pomona and CIPT will also run a
mini-workshop for a local school district. Pomona Physics
Teacher Workshops have been so well received that the
Whittier Union School District is co-sponsoring
mini-workshop on “Physics with LEDs,” on Friday, February
25. A reprise of Pomona’s 2003 program, this event was
organized by Lena Delgado, a mathematics and science teacher
from Whitney High School who attended both of Pomona’s
previous workshops, as well as a series of summer workshops
at Cornell Institute for Physics Teachers (CIPT).
The February 25, mini-workshop for Whittier teachers will
include a reprise two of the popular activities from the
2003 Pomona program:
• "Phantastic Photon" - Different colors of light are
directly related to the energy and wavelength of the photons
which compose that light. Students investigate these
relationships by shining colored light from super-bright
LEDs onto fluorescent paint and glow-in-the-dark tape,
observing the emitted light by eye and with a handheld
spectrometer. Students order the colors of light from
highest to lowest energy and determine the role of light
intensity by exciting the energy level transitions involved
in fluorescence.
• "Light Emitting Diodes" (LED) - Using super-bright
light-emitting diodes students investigate the conversion of
electrical energy into light. Measuring and comparing the
energy lost by each electron with the frequency of the
emitted light for several LED colors allows students to
determine Plank's constant, a fundamental number in quantum
mechanics. Students also investigate other properties of
LEDs and learn why they are increasingly used as indicators
and light sources.
“Physics with LEDs” is co-sponsored by Pomona College, CIPT
and the Whittier Union School District. It will begin at
3:30 p.m. and will be held at the Whittier Union School
District, 9401 S. Painter Ave., Room MV 200, Whittier.
In conjunction with these workshops, Pomona College will
establish a West Coast branch of the successful CIPT lending
library, opening this spring. The lending library will allow
teachers who have participated in one of the Pomona/CIPT
workshops to borrow full classroom sets of supplies for many
of the laboratory and demonstrations that are taught at the
workshops. Teachers can check out the supplies for a week
before returning them to the library.
Pomona College is one of the nation’s premier liberal arts
institutions, offering a comprehensive program in the arts,
humanities, social sciences and natural sciences. It’s
hallmarks include small classes, close relationships between
students and faculty, and a range of opportunities for
student research. Visit Pomona College on the web at
www.pomona.edu.
CONTACTS:
David Tanenbaum
Associate Professor of Physics, Pomona College, &
Visiting Scientist, Cornell University, School of Applied
and Engineering Physics
Phone: (607) 255-7853
Email:
dtanenbaum@pomona.edu
Monica Plisch
Director, CNS Institute for Physics Teachers, &
Lecturer, Applied and Engineering Physics
Cornell University
Phone: (607) 255-2102
Email: mjp11@cornell.edu
Web:
http://www.cns.cornell.edu/cipt/introduction.html
Lena Delgado
Physics Teacher
Whitney High School, Cerritos
Campus Phone: (562) 926-5566 x22341
BonnieJo Panagos
Whittier Union School District
9401 S. Painter Ave., Whittier
Phone: (562) 698-8121 ext. 1171
Fax: (562) 693-4136
Lending Library Information
http://cns.cornell.edu/cipt/labs/lab-index.html
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