Welcome to the web site of the Physics Instructional Resource Team (PIRT) at Arizona State University. The mission of PIRT is to be “Focused on Excellence” in Physics Education. The web site is one of the tools used by PIRT to accomplish this mission. The primary contents of the site are catalogs of our lecture demonstration and media collections. It is intended to expand this web site in the near future by adding  a catalog of physics applets and web resources, information and web resources on physics pedagogy, and a catalog of our laboratory experiment collection.
Lecture Demonstration Catalog
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

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.

A complete listing of the Areas, Topics, and Concepts in the DCS is available here. Note that some Topic sections (e.g. 1B) are not used in the DCS for whatever reason, perhaps to allow for future expansion.
A PIRA Demonstration Bibliography with about 9300 entries arranged according to the DCS is housed at The University of Colorado at Boulder. Also housed at the University of Colorado at Boulder is the Global Demo Web Spider which allows searching of 57 Physics Lecture Demonstration Web sites at once.
Using ASU’s  PIRT Demo Catalog - The catalog can be accessed from the PIRT home page either with the search function or the hierarchical drop-down menus. Both will return results in a list format ordered by DCS number with titles, descriptions, locations and a thumbnail image if available. Each entry is linked to a detail page which will have further information and a larger version of the thumbnail. Additional thumbnails on the detail page will swap the large image and captions when rolled over. Note that when the demo is a video, that is indicated in the title. Throughout the catalog the top banner as well as navigation buttons will return you to the home page.