Teachers Marisa Carillo and Doug Muckelroy (top photo) are building a mousetrap car as part of a hands-on workshop at the March Meeting High School Physics Teachers’ Day.
In the bottom photo, Donald Kolle and Jeanette DeHart are performing a kinematics experiment with a calculator-based ranger and graphing calculator. Reflected ultrasonic pulses provide the distance from the ranger to the ball, and the calculator produces graphs of distance, speed, and acceleration vs. time.
The program also included two research talks, one on Granular Material by George Crabtree and Igor Aronson of Argonne National Lab, and the other on Quasicrystals by Renee Diehl of Penn State. Physicists from the meeting joined the teachers for lunch.