2018 Annual Report

University of Minnesota QuarkNet Center Annual Report

The Minnesota QuarkNet Center hosted two events during 2018: A CMS Masterclass and a summer teacher meeting. In addition, one Minnesota teacher (Tucker Besel) attended the week-long Data Camp at Fermilab in July.  

The CMS Masterclass held at the University of Minnesota on March 24 was attended by ten students and two teachers from two Minneapolis area high schools. In the summer, teachers met at the University of Minnesota on June 12-14. On the first two days of this meeting, teachers participated in a Neutrino Data Workshop Prototype co-led by QuarkNet staff teachers Ken Cecire and Shane Wood. Ken and Shane used this as an opportunity to test out several aspects of this new QuarkNet workshop. Teachers learned about neutrinos and their detection, built coupled pendula and used their oscillations to describe an analogy to neutrino oscillation, used data from the MINERvA detector to measure the lifetime of a muon, analyzed MINERvA neutrino data in order to determine the extent of a carbon nucleus, had a virtual visit to Fermilab’s Remote Operations Center (ROC) West. At the end of the two-day workshop, teachers provided feedback for Ken and Shane, suggesting several ways to improve the workshop in the future. In addition, Ken Heller gave a talk updating the teachers on physics education research at the U of M. On the final day of the teacher meeting, teachers had the opportunity to observe several large-scale demos set up by Brian Andersson, then spent the remainder of the day building a hovercraft each large enough to hold a person to bring back to their schools.

Mentor: Dan Cronin-Hennessy

Lead Teacher: Jon Anderson