Round two of the international 'Physics on Stage' outreach initiative has resulted in a valuable guide for teachers that includes dozens of classroomexperiments, writes Dick Ahlstrom
The Minister of Education and Science is about to get a practical demonstration in the delights of physics teaching courtesy of "Physics on Stage" and the Institute of Physics in Ireland. Mr Dempsey will be encouraged to blow at ping pong balls through straws, burst balloons with a candle flame and pop a hard-boiled egg into a flask without touching it.
The Institute will next week present Mr Dempsey with a copy of a new teaching guide produced by "Physics on Stage 2", an international outreach initiative. "Physics on Stage" seeks to encourage more people to study physics and to consider it as a worthwhile career.
Trying to knock fun out of physics might sound like mission impossible to the uninitiated, but the new booklet hopes to overturn this misconception. It includes more than 50 low-cost experiments that should make things easier for the teacher and more interesting for the students.
The "Physics on Stage" initiative for European physics educators was launched in 2000. Three of Europe's leading research organisations, the European Space Agency, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) and the European Southern Observatory, joined forces to fund the initiative, which is now active in 22 countries.
Its first effort resulted in the "Plumbers Sinfonia Band" stage show, a unique merger of music and physics that produced wonderful entertainment, all coming from home-made musical instruments fashioned from plastic piping, says Ms Alison Hackett, who represents the IOP here.
"For the second one we took a different tack," she says. "This involved trying to come back to the demonstrations teachers could use in the classroom."
The object, she says, is "to find new ways to enthuse teachers about physics". The booklet does just that. It is a how-to guide offering simple but effective experiments that can be achieved with little or no money.
The equipment involved ranges from plastic mineral bottles, thread spools, and candles to balloons and string. There is a decided lack of good laboratory facilities in most Irish schools, but the booklet finds a way around this deficit, suggesting useful experiments that will keep the students interested but cost very little money. They are particularly suited to primary cycle, says Hackett.
Each country was asked to produce a booklet of good demonstration experiments for use in schools and "Physics on Stage" provided €5,000 for this purpose. "The premise was you were supposed to match that with local funding and we got that from Forfás and the IOP," says Hackett.
The money was used initially to bring six physics teachers to the "Physics on Stage 2" conference held last April in ESTEC, the European Space Agency's research and technology centre at Noordvjick, Netherlands.
The six put together a booklet that included a number of experiments devised here. "Every country had an exhibition stand and we had the demonstrations we had in our booklet," says Hackett.
The country delegates went from stand to stand and were encouraged to copy any experiments that seemed suitable and matched their own country's science curriculum. Once back home, the Irish delegates put them together in a 64-page booklet.
This was sent free of charge to all physics teachers on the Physics Support Service lists held by the IOP. They were also sent to the head of physics in every school in Northern Ireland, says Hackett.
All told, 3,000 booklets were produced. "That was really all the funding we had. If we had more we would print more," she says.
The booklets may be gone but the ideas remain, provided free of charge on a special website. All of the experiments are available at www.pos2.ie