Teaching Resources from Fermilab

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Left: Decay of Top Quark .....................................Right: Fermilabyrinth
(Images courtesy of Fermilab.)

Fermilab has put together many resources for teachers; unfortunately they vary wildly in quality. It took me hours and hour to sift through all the material. Here are the resources from the best down as of July 2010.

**** Finding the Mass of the Top Quark
http://ed.fnal.gov/samplers/hsphys/activities/summary.shtml

This resource is the easiest to follow and the most useful. It has the students use real data, conservation of momentum in 2-D and E = mc2 to find the mass of the sixth and final quark. I have tried to package it so that it is even easier to teach. Massing the Top Quark This lesson goes well with some of the games in Fermilabyrinth.

**** Fermilabyrinth
http://ed.fnal.gov/projects/labyrinth/games/index1.html

This is a series of 12 games involving accelerators, detectors and elementary particle physics. The quality of the games is rather uneven – some are fabulous and some are a waste of time. I recommend five of them: Warp Speed (Push the Particle), Ghost Bustin’(Particle Trapping and Detector Detail) and Law and Order(Baryon Bonanza and Particle Families).

* http://ed.fnal.gov/data/

These are Fermilab’s data based investigations. The relativity one is like a huge scavenger hunt. It’s very open ended and students have to hunt for the theoretical knowledge and the data they need by following various links. I gave up.

* http://quarknet.fnal.gov/run2/student_index.shtml

This is about the hunt for the Higgs boson – what a great topic! It is similar in format to the relativity one above. It might be worthwhile but meant too much hunting around for me.

* http://ed.fnal.gov/trc_new/projects/project_list.shtml

This is Fermilab’s attempt to get teachers developing resources to share. It has almost no physics and the physics links didn’t work for me.