The Demonstration Catalog is used as an aid to selection of demonstrations by faculty and staff at Arizona State University and as a primary repository of documentation on the use of the collection. Although already a major resource, it is a work in progress and much content is skeletal and will be expanded over time.

Safety Disclaimer

The demonstrations contained and referenced herein are listed for the purposes of cataloging and describing physics demonstrations which should be conducted only under the direction of a trained instructional support professional or physicist. These demonstrations are not presented for the purpose of being conducted by persons unconnected to this Facility and/or persons not consulting with or being supervised by the recognized instructional support professional or physicist and his/her staff. The University is responsible only for those demonstrations carried out using its own equipment using established safety and scheduling policies, and bears no responsibility for those choosing to use this source material for their own purposes. All demonstrations described and contained herein are public domain, and can also be found in reference materials in libraries, bookstores, and electronic sources. Further information regarding legal liability in use of demonstrations and labs will be found on the web site Injuries in School/College Laboratories in USA.

Arrangement of the Catalog

The Demonstration Catalog is arranged according to the Demonstration Classification Scheme (DCS) of the Physics Instructional Resource Association (PIRA). This scheme has been adopted by many major universities.
The goal of the PIRA Demonstration Classification Scheme is to create a logically organized and universally inclusive taxonomy giving a unique number to every lecture demonstration. The structure of the classification system is as follows:

Example: 1D60.10 Howitzer and Tunnel

    1 - Area (mechanics)

    D - Topic (motion in two dimensions)

    60 - Concept (projectile motion)

    10 - Demonstration (Howitzer and Tunnel)

At ASU, we use an extension of the scheme with suffixes to indicate versions of a demo, as follows:

    1D60.10A (version A) and 1D60.10B (version B)

Versions might be differentiated by equipment such as computerized or non-computerized, by type such as real or video, or by size or some other characteristic that can be important in local communication about exactly what is to be provided.

Where one of our demonstrations does not have an official listing in the DCS we have used a three digit decimal number to indicate it is a locally-assigned number, as in 1D60.120. At this writing the official numbers all use 2-digit decimals.

Note that some Topic sections (e.g. 1B) are not used in the DCS for whatever reason, perhaps to allow for future expansion.
The PIRA Demonstration Bibliography can be found here.

Using ASU’s PIRT Demo Catalog

The catalog can be accessed from the left sidebar by clicking on the expandable hyperlinks. Navigation through this menu will lead users to pages listing all available demonstrations for the chosen concept. Each entry is linked to a detail page which will have further information. Note that when the demo is a video, that is indicated in the title and by color. Clicking on the PIRT logo will return you to the home page.