Colliding Particles - Hunting the Higgs

This 2009 series of videos uses work at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) to illustrate how science works. The downloadable videos are each about 9 minutes in length, and teacher resources are provided, including Power Point presentations and student activities.

Colliding Particles’ is a series of films following just one of the teams of physicists involved in the research at the LHC. The project documents their work at the frontiers of particle physics, exploring the human stories behind the research and investigating the workings of the scientific process itself." http://www.collidingparticles.com/

I forsee using this at the beginning of the year to illustrate the process of science. There is even an activity (Episode 2, Activity 2) that has students detail the process of becoming an expert at something. I thought this was ingenious! How many of your students complain about having to practice Physics... this addresses that objection right away. I think students will relate well to these videos. The participants are youthful (at least in comparison to most of the physicists I have seen in educational films), the cinematographic techniques are modern, and the clips are all fairly short. The Power Point presentations even have cartoons...