Detectors and Moodles

Hey all.

To finish the blog for today i'll summarise some of the other lectures that we had today.

We had two further lectures for Particle Accelerators and Detection. Both of these were interesting although also very difficult to understand as the pace of the lectures were really quick.

The interesting thing is that the basic principles are very simple and i look forward to discussing them with the Advanced Higher class. (Mwa hah ha) The overall conclusion though is that to build a particle accelerator and detector is a very complex process and a very challenging technical/engineering endeavour.

There are so many corrections, effects to take into account it is amazing that in a short 50 years we have found so much about the fundamental particles that i am willing them to find the Higgs Boson to complete the picture. (As i understand it from this point.)

This is really strange. As i sit here writing this, there has been a sudden 'squall' of heavy wind. It's almost as if a mini tornado swept through to try and uproot the buildings and tree. I fel a heavy storm coming on later tonight - lightning storms hopefully!!!!!

In the afternoon we had a presentation from Karl Sarnow who is working for the EU on developing e-resources for European countries. He is amazingly enthusiastic about it and there was a lot that he showed me that i would to implement in lessons.

There are two things which interested me -
(1) Moodle - which is an online/server type teaching resource that allows teachers to design online lessons which record pupils' classwork. I can see many possibilites for this, especially if i can tie it in with SMART board software. Unfortunately, I'm not sure if the Will will be there from the school.

I mean this in the sense that it is something which is pretty left-field to what we are currently doing and secondly, it will require a lot of work to develop materials/implement it - not to mention we need more computers for pupils to make it work!
It will be interesting when i get back to school;-)

(2) There is a Maple -like program included in the software. For those who don't know what it is, 'Maple' is a program that lets you do all sorts of Mathematical operations such as Differentiation, integration, functions, graphs etc!!! Woohoo!

I'm just a maths geek when it comes to it:-)