GBS Teachers and Students Participate in High Energy Physics Initiatives

Jeff Rylander, Instructional Supervisor for Science at GBS, had the privilege of traveling to Sendai, Japan, from February 27-March 3. He represented Glenbrook South High School and Fermilab, and traveled with a Quarknet staff member from Fermilab and another teacher from California and presented a two-day workshop to Japanese teachers on "Using Cosmic Ray Detectors in the High School Classroom." These teachers will be using detectors to collect cosmic ray data and learning to upload this data to the e-lab site where it can be analyzed and shared with other high school groups from around the world. Currently, there are approximately 500 of these cosmic ray detectors in high schools. GBS and GBN both have detectors that are currently up and running. This workshop was held in conjunction with a conference for particle physicists from several countries who will be discussing the future of particle physics over the next two decades.

Read Fermilab's Press Release.

In addition, in mid-March GBS will be taking approximately 10 students to Argonne National Labs for a one-day, interactive video-conference on the future of particle physics as CERN (the Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire, or European Council for Nuclear Research) comes online in April of 2008. Our students will participate with students at 14 other laboratories from around the country learning from and being able to ask questions of physicists about the goals and hopes of this new accelerator in Europe. Also, some of our students have applied to serve as one of four student teams who will be selected as student journalists and travel to Switzerland for the opening ceremonies of CERN's new particle accelerator. They will find out next week if they have been selected.