Reflections of QuarkNet Teachers and Staff

It is hard to believe that ten years have passed since Leroy Castle and I became lead teachers for the Notre Dame QuarkNet center. Since that time the program has grown under the guidance of Dr. Randy Ruchti, with the addition of an eight-week Research Experiences for Teachers summer program along with QuarkNet week and later an eight-week Research Experiences for High School Students summer program. Including the summer of 2008, we have had 28 teachers and 128 high school students involved at some time.

During this period I have been participating in several projects including: building optical decoder units for Compact Muon Solenoid detector at CERN, building a cosmic ray detector that uses image intensifiers to allow a cosmic ray to be "seen," building a cosmic ray detector using scintillating plastic and wave-shifting fibers coupled with a photomultiplier tube, and working with the QuarkNet cosmic ray detectors and "DAQ" board.

Finally, I have learned more acronyms that a person needs to know. When a teacher at my high school asked me in the fall what I did the previous summer, I told him "I built ODUs for the CMS at the LHC at CERN." He walked away shaking his head.