Evaluating the MIT Cosmic Watch detector as an educational resource

Siena College is a small liberal-arts college in upstate-NY with about 3200 students and 90 Physics majors, and no graduate program. This enforces some limits on the types of hardware projects students can get involved in, given both the material resources and availability of instructors. We have spent the last year evaluating the MIT Cosmic Watch 100 muon detector as a potential educational resource for both budding particle physicists and applied physicists looking for a more sophisticated electronics project. We have also explored how it can be used not just for hardware education but to also teach more about particle physics and special relativity. To this end we have attempted to observe the effects of time dilation on a visit to the same Mt. Washington observatory that was part of a historic cosmic ray experiment. Our experiences and findings will be discussed in this poster.