The programs, funded in part by the National Science Foundation, gave participants the chance to spend nearly two weeks sharing methods of demonstrating physical principles, learning new techniques for enlivening physics lectures, and building equipment in the well-equipped machine shop to take back to their own classrooms.
As a high school physics teacher at Kingston Collegiate and Vocational Institute in Kingston, Ontario, I participated in the program in 1977, spending the first two weeks of August at VMI. To me, no physics lesson was complete without some link to the real world and everyday experience, and the course provided a wealth of opportunities to engage in that vision.
Attendees at the 1977 "Lecture Demonstration Methods in Physics Instruction" summer course, held at the Virginia Military Institute. Instructor Dick Minnix is on the left side of the second row; Rae Carpenter is on the right side of the top row.
Ivars Peterson getting the point: sitting on a bed of nails to experience the relationship between pressure and surface area.
Field trips took course attendees to the radio telescopes at Green Bank, West Virginia, Thomas Jefferson's Monticello and University of Virginia, and a farm, where they could see vivid demonstrations of physical principles in action, harnessed for human use.
Thanks to gravity and careful design, a wooden millrace delivers water to a mill at Halcyon Farm.
Standing beside a massive radio telescope at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Green Bank, West Virginia.
Thomas Jefferson's Monticello, Charlottesville, Virginia, 1977.
Statue of Thomas Jefferson in front of the Rotunda at the University of Virginia, Charlottesville,Virginia, 1977.
Course completion certificate.
In 1993, Minnix and Carpenter published The Dick and Rae Physics Demo Notebook, which contains 650 of their favorite physics lecture demonstrations.
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