Student ACtivities:
Fundamental Particles

The Contemporary Physics Education Project has a free set of exciting classroom activities with worksheets.

This set, which has been very popular for 30 years, brings particle physics to the classroom with meaningful activities. It describes the concepts of the Fundamental Particles and Interactions chart: quarks, neutrinos, the fundamental forces, the history, as well as the design and use of particle accelerators and detectors.

It has separate student and teacher worksheets. Teachers are encouraged to print out and reproduce these pages for classroom activities. Produced in cooperation with the U.S. Department of Energy.

Activity One: Fundamentally Speaking

True/False questions to gauge prior knowledge

English
Español

Activity Two: Psyching Out the System

Puzzle imitating the particle physics puzzle, given what you see and what is never seen discover the building blocks and their rules of interaction. 

English
Español

Activity Three: Rutherford's Discovery

Using physics you know (how balls roll on a flat surface and how they bounce off a wall) to find out about things you cannot see (hidden wood block shapes). 

English
Español

Activity Four: Tracking Unseen Particles

Tracking the path of magnetic marbles using iron fillings-an analogy for detecting without seeing. 

English
Español

Activity Five: The Rules of the Game

Deducing conservation rules from a table of observed particle processes (collisions or decays) alongside a list of some never observed. 

English
Español

Activity Six: Observing Magnetic Effects on Particle Beams

Using magnets to deflect and distort an oscilloscope spot, as an example of how particle beams can be steered and controlled. 

English
Español

Activity Seven: Picturing Particles

Interpreting diagrams of particle events as seen by a multi-layered detector using a key and some conservation rules. 

English
Español

Background of Particle Physics
English and Spanish