Sociedad Latina’s summer program participates in college physics
Reposted from BU College of Arts and Sciences Community post: Sociedad Latina Collaboration Brings Middle Schoolers to the Physics Classroom.
Last week Paul Trunfio’s PY106 class paired up with the Sociedad Latina Summer Program. The middle school students from the Boston after-school program attended the physics course as part of an ongoing collaboration in the Network Science for All program (sponsored by the National Science Foundation).
The visit included participating in a lecture along with live demonstrations illustrating the relationship between electricity and magnetism (ionized gas in electric fields, magnetic levitation, electromagnets, and more). Students learned about forces, how electric currents produce magnetic fields, as well as how changing electric and magnetic fields lead to fascinating and unexpected real-world applications.
After participating in the lecture component, the middle school students joined the undergraduate students working together on a short worksheet on forces and Newton’s Laws and then applied this knowledge to forces on charges in electric and magnetic fields.
Finally, during an open lab, middle school students explored experiments centered around: (1) Electricity: electric charges, forces and generators and (2) Magnetism: Faraday’s Law experiment whereby an electric current is formed merely by moving a magnet through a coil of wire.
