Top Five Items to Add to Your Lab

Often on this blog, I will be including Quick Tips for Teachers. 

Today’s entry is about the Top 5 Items to Add to Your Lab.

These are tools that, if you don’t have them already, you should obtain right away, and learn how to use them.

1.    Polarizers

2.  Plasma Ball—Check out my video about top ten demos with a plasma ball if you haven’t already.

3.  Cathode Ray Tube

4.  Oscilloscope—ask the physics techs at your local university if they have any old oscilloscopes they’d like to donate to your school.

5.  Electronic Keyboard

The last one may sound unexpected, but I often use an electronic keyboard as a tone generator. This tool is very useful for teaching about sound waves, among other things.

I hope these top five items enhance your teaching in the physics lab and lead to many enriching labs and demos.

Top Ten Best Plasma Ball Demos

You have a plasma ball in your lab, now what should you do with it? 

Check out this video I made to find out about demos and what you and your students can learn from each simple yet engaging demo. Most physical science standards require that students understand plasma as the fourth state of matter. 

What is a plasma ball? Well, by my definition, it is a safe and engaging tool for studying high voltages in the electric field.

One sample demo is the following: The electric field can be investigated with a small neon bulb or diode. If you bring it close to the plasma ball, it will light up! There are nine more interesting demos included in the video. What are you waiting for? Just go watch it!





Arbor Scientific also featured this video on their blog and you can watch it on their YouTube channel as well. If you want to learn about the demos in writing, go read the article at the Arbor Scientific Cool Stuff blog.