In general, components of an apparatus or a physical process in an educational experiment tend to be presented as a black box to the students. The black boxes often prevent the students from understanding the point of the experiment, and are connected to the so called indigestion phenomena. In an ion acceleration experiment, the above situation occurs very easily due to the complexity of the, system and the many related physical processes. It has been found that the following steps are quite effective at minimizing the black box effect for an ion acceleration and irradiation experiment: 1) Require preparatory reports prior to doing the experiment and interview the student when the report is turned in. 2) Provide adequate visual information (repeated study visits to the accelerator and related equipment, provide color pictures of parts of the machine in the written experimental procedure, and provide CCD camera picutures of the ion beam profile on the inserted quarz plate during the machine operation). 3) Require repeated practice of beam acceleration and handling, and performing the characteristic measurement of miniature high voltage generation (Cockcroft) circuit. In particular, it was very important to guide the students through the preparatory report and answer the questions from teachers for recent students who are not aiming to do so autonomously.
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