AAPT Section News, July 2013
—Page 4
Hawaii Section
Nomination of new officers
Mike Weber agrees to continue as Treasurer
Liz King would like to step down as secretary, but agrees
to continue. The new VP should, ideally, be a high school
teacher. Paul Sherard agrees to be the next VP.
Representative: Mike Nassir will be going to the Summer
(July) meeting in Portland, anyway. Also, there’s a good
chance that his teaching schedule won’t conflict with the
winter meeting in Florida (January 6-8, 2014).
Joe Lazlo agrees to take on the role of “provider of food”
for the rest of the foreseeable future. This should boost
attendance . . . . .
Slate of officers (Eric Dodson as President, Paul Sherard
as VP, Mike Weber as Treasurer, Liz King as Secretary,
Mike Nassir as Representative, and Joe Lazslo as Foodie) is
proposed and motion passes.
Dates of next year’s Fall and Spring meetings:
Fall meeting on Saturday August 24th, at Chaminade
April 26, 2014 at Kamehameha
Committee Reports
24th Physics Olympics, a joint production of 5 college
campuses, with 120 high school students competing, was
another huge success. Paul notes that he never knows about
it till it’s over, which is something that needs to be remedied.
Treasurer’s Report
Presented by Liz as Mike is absent. Two slides of Phys
Olympics costs over time and our bank account balance
over time. No correlations seen. We give money to a teacher
of the best science fair phy/astro project (went to a guy at
Mililani High this year), and we fund the Phys Olympics.
We get money from membership dues and occasionally from
Paul Hewitt.
New Business
From Hanno – kids are playing on iPads a lot at his school.
He has a class set to use. Anyone with experience using these
in class, especially data collection? The Vernier system offers
a mini that will wirelessly broadcast data from old sensor
to iPads. The Minis don’t interface well with the motion
detectors, so you need to run the labs first to see how it
works. The minis cost roughly $100 each, compared to $400
for new LabQuests. You can get a site license for Vernier on
the iPad. OnCloud is a free app that is the Microsoft Office
programs, but limited in application and free. Or you can
pay $20 to Microsoft for an authentic version that works
better. But for taking data, it works just fine, creates Excell
spreadsheets and graphs with analysis, etc.
From Mike Nassir: The National AAPT membership is $120
and comes with an excellent magazine, the Physics Teacher.
Also gives good discounts to members. A reminder: you
are supposed to be a member of the national organization in
order to join the local organization.
Presentations
Eric Dodson
Presentation for Physics Olympics – motion detector graphs.
Graphs (dist/time) are pre-made, students must move to
match the graph. The program which presents the graph
tracks the movement and generates a different-colored line
on same graph, then computes the correlation as a score. At
each pixel, it calculates the difference between target and
performance. He created the software in C and Python with a
micro-processor kit. Vernier provides a very similar lab, but
doesn’t provide a score. Then he showed us a game that he
programmed that’s like Pong, but you are the paddle, running
back and forth (the motion sensor is used to move the paddle
on the screen based on your position from the sensor).
Peter Grach
Using data from Muon detectors (Quarknet) in the
classroom. Historical overview: we start teaching Newton’s
Laws (1700s) and usually end with EM Induction/Lenz’s
Law (1830 – Queen Kaahumanu was regent here, Andrew
Jackson was President). But we can bring TODAYS physics
into the classroom without needing to build ATLAS or any
other particle accelerator in our prep rooms. Quarknet brings
high-energy, modern physics into the classroom; there are
4 classroom muon detectors in the Islands and hundreds
around the world. You don’t have to build or troubleshoot
anything – you can pull up data from anywhere for your kids
can analyze (the data from all the detectors is on a Website).
They can put their data analysis right onto the eLab Website.
Go to
, log in as a guest, and
start with the pretest. There are simulations, explanations,
and activities concerning sub-atomic particles (for example,
a muon entering the atmosphere and creating a particle
shower). Students can even build a poster of their work right
on the site. The site even provides rubrics for grading, if
you want to grade the posters. There’s a post-test, too. Use
this in conjunction with another excellent Website, www.
particleadventure.org.
Eric
Demonstration – a cheap alternative to Gencon. Go to the
swapmeet and buy an old drill, no battery needed. Put a hand
crank (bend a metal rod) into where you would put a drill bit.
You can attach to a little breadboard and a display to show
the watts generated by hand cranking. Cool for those of you
who can build electronic stuffs.
Joe Lazlo make-n-take straw rockets
Start with a blowgun (straw, bit of bamboo skewer with
cotton, see photo), then go to a balloon (blow up, let go –
Newton’s 3rd law, compare long balloons to round balloons),
then attach a balloon to a straw (slurpee straws and jamba
juice straws work well, bigger diameter) and tape the straw
to the balloon (anchor the tape by wrapping it around the
straw – only the straw – first, then the balloon , and then
blow up the balloon and let go and you’ll get a much more
directed/stable flight pattern). Then the kids can cut the straw
