Part 2 is below.

Enjoy!

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Wikipedia and the National Lightning Safety Institute in the USA have some good information about lightning detectors but it is fairly general. There are some circuit diagrams online that show how to build your own lightning detector.

I set as a challenge to my students to design a lightning detector. I thought this would be an interesting way for them to think about electric and magnetic fields, EM pulses, sound and light. Interestingly, none of the students came up with using light detection to detect lightning even though such detectors are available. They worked well in their groups and were able to make some interesting connections between the different areas of Physics.

I also like this video on recreating the Big Bang and the Atlas experiment.  Students are interested in these experiments and it is great to get an explanation directly from CERN.

For binary stars you can also look at http://astro.unl.edu/naap/ebs/animations/ebs.html This is a very sophisticated applet and might be nice for setting as a simulation that you could use a part of your practical program.

Dr. Mazur’s homepage has some good links to his educational research.  If you have 90 minutes to spare, the lecture at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WwslBPj8GgI is fantastic. 

One question I have about Dr. Mazur’s peer to peer instruction is how well it works in different settings.  I can imagine students at Harvard being excellent peer to peer instructors but what about the students in the bottom set of a mathematics class?

I’m sure we have made a few common mistakes as well.  We have tried different formats for putting out student notes on the computer. Word documents that they can download and complete seemed like a good idea but student feedback said they didn’t like this as it took too long to type answers and they couldn’t scribble and annotate easily.

I am trying a compromise at present.  Some power points where students get information and follow links.  They link to simulations and answer questions about them.  However the questions are on paper with minatures of the slides printed next to them.  They seem to like this but I dont think I’ll deliver the whole course this way.

The physics in this is great.  Note that the magnets and ball bearings (the gun) recoil so momentum is conserved.

The ball leaves the magnets at a greater velocity than the arriving ball, that is why it is so cool.  It doesn’t break the law of conservation of energy as the fired ball starts further away from the magnet so the work done to move it away from the magnet is less than the energy lost by the first ball as it “falls” towards the magnet.  There is a good analogy to potential here.  (magnetic potential energy).

So what will we study in the extended essay.  Not sure yet but there are loads of possibilities.  perhaps a graph of magnetic force against distance and integrate to get the work done.  Vary the distance of the fired ball from the magnets.  Vary the number of magnets.  what about multiple Gauss guns.  There are some examples on you tube.  What is the optimum spacing to get maximum velocity of the fired ball?  I’m really looking forward to supervising this essay.