Chipola offers an honors section in many classes in which those enrolled get an opportunity to explore some aspect of the subject area in more detail than students taking the regular section of the course. The experiences gained by the honors physics students typically take the form of an individual or group project in which a demonstation or application of some physical principle is developed in their physics class and presented to other honors students during their weekly seminar meetings. Recently, many of the physics presentations have benefited from funds provided by SPD in response to proposals which point out the importance of significant honors projects which are commensurate with those achieved by university students. As a consequence, many of the projects completed during the past year have been greatly improved over those of previous years. A summary of several honors projects from the past year is given below:
Jessus Williford and Murray Baker shared a project in which they designed and constructed a robot. They built their robots using a kit which resulted from a collaboration between Lego and MIT. Issues of stability and camera alignment were confronted as they successfully completed a walking robot capable of detecting motion and color in its environment, as shown below. As an extension of their project during the second semester of physics, they incorporated the motherboard of a donated laptop computer into the body of a rolling-track robot. This totally self-contained robot was programmed to move according to images recieved by the PC camera, without the necessity of an external computer. It is expected that honors students in future sections will extend the use of these kits to explore other robotics applications.
A hologram project was completed by Will Dunaway, Chris Hughes, and Jeremy Reese. The interference of a coherent source of light from a common laser pointer was used to produce transmission holograms. They presented results on both the reflection and transmission type holograms to their fellow honors students.
A circuit was constructed by Will Dunaway and Max Ellis in order to demonstrate the principle of magnetic propulsion. The circuit was used to sense the magnetic field from a track made of magnets, and continually adjust the field in order to take advantage of the north pole/south pole atrraction between magnets. In their honors seminar presentation they included a discussion of magnetic levitation trains and how magnetic propulsion is involved in moving such trains.
Jesse Birch designed a solar oven which demonstrated the sun's rays can be concentrated by a reflecting parabolic surface. An understanding of the ray optics involved when using curved reflecting surfaces is required in order to focus the energy efficiently at the solar collector's focal point. Jesse's project also explored various solar energy applications and the economic feasibility of switching to solar power.
The team of Chris Hughes, Justin Hosey and Jeremy Reese undertook the difficult task of studying nanotubes, which are objects that have an inner diameter of nearly a trillionth of a meter. By using a combination of wet chemistry techniques and high temperature treatment, they were able fill a sample of purchased nanotube powder with lead. The job of confirming the tubes were filled was done using the powerful transmission electron microscope (TEM) at the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory. The students were happy to see their nanotubes were filled after spending so much time preparing a sample which did not seem change its appearance. The image below is a TEM micrograph of a filled nanotube magnified one million times. For purposes of the scale, the solid bar near the bottom of the figure represents a length of 20 nm.
