Gabriel's Notebook: Week 1 - DRAGON

Grade 10 student Gabriel Stewart is visiting TRIUMF for the next 4 weeks. During his time here, he will spend three afternoons a week with different research groups around the lab. These posts are his notes from his experiences. During his first week, he spent time with the DRAGON experiment, installing a camera to see inside a vacuum tube.

Gabriel is at TRIUMF as part of the Emerging Aboriginal Scholars Summer Camp put on by the Pacific Institute for Mathematical Sciences and the First Nations House of Learning at the University of British Columbia. For the month of July, students from the camp are placed in research environments after their morning classes.  Gabriel is the second young aboriginal student to visit and work at TRIUMF, following in the footsteps of Dylon Martin from Thomson, Manitoba who visited the lab in 2009. 

Day 1

It was a very interesting week. On the first day, we bought a camera for inside a vacuum tube at the spy store.

Back at ISAC I, we tested it out (me, Jennifer, and Saige). After figuring out that we attached it wrong, we changed it to make it work, then we took apart the camera. That was pretty much my day.

Day 2

Right off the bat, I had to go to a meeting with the DRAGON scientists. If you weren’t raised on science, you didn’t have a chance to understand them. After the confusing meeting, Lars and Saige had a coffee break while I ate yummy cookies J.  Once they were all caffeined-up, we went to the building with the cyclotron and did some experiments with the test chamber.

Day 3

Day three my last day with the DRAGON program, and all I was thinking was “all I did was go to the spy store had one very confusing meeting and had a coffee break.” Today I watched Saige solder on LED lights onto a resistor, then put it into a box to see if the camera lighting was any better. After trying a couple of tactics to no avail, they decided to buy one of those LED flashlights from the dollar store. One of the things I learned is that physicists are very thrifty about the material they need, which is awesome :D. Well, that was pretty much my week and I have to say, it beats being bored at home!

- Written by Gabriel Stewart, with editorial notes from Jennifer Gagné, Web Publishing Coordinator at TRIUMF

Gabriel with the team, Lars Martin and Jennifer Fallis

Installing equipment components