Developing the Cosmic Watch for High School Classrooms

Abstract

The Cosmic Watch is a small, inexpensive cosmic ray detector developed by Spencer Axani of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It is designed for experimenters to build and has been adopted for educational use worldwide. Inspired by the work of Accel Kitchen in Japan, the U.S. QuarkNet program built 48 Cosmic Watches to test for use in high school physics laboratories. The small size and low cost make the Cosmic Watch ideal for use by a whole class in a typical lab period. For this use case to be effective, the units must be tested in schools and then the construction process and documentation further developed to alleviate any shortcomings. For high school teachers planning a student activity, reliability and ease of use are critical. QuarkNet is in this testing and development phase now and has a few challenges to overcome before further construction.