Xplora received the grant from Agilent foundation about one year ago, a team of developers from University of Kaiserslautern in Germany strived to implement the experiment in a way that would enable students to run the experiment themselves. The team  of developers had to overcome several technical obstacles which hindered the use of the experiment in a school laboratory. By setting up the experiment in a Remote Controlled Laboratory (RCL), which is the kernel of a web experiment the experiment is not available in an easy to use way, which allows students to obtain quantitative results from an experiment, rarely used in schools.

The Millikan experiment has a special pedagogical value in that it is so far the only experiment, telling us about the nature of charge. It was the first and only experiment, that allowed the conclusion, that charge exists in portions only. It allowed even the determination of the charges portion, called the elementary charge. This result at the dawn of quantum mechanics brought a Nobel prize to the inventor, Robert Andrews Millikan.

The principle of operation is easy: Blow oil drops between the two plates of an electrical condenser and watch them drop though a microscope. Then switch on a voltage to the condenser plates and watch the difference in speed. This allows the calculation of the amount of charge on the oil drops, which they got by friction when blown into the condenser. But then comes the tricky part: A conclusion about the quantum nature of charge requires hundreds or better thousands of results to be available. How could a student do this, when taking one measurement would take him a day?

The Internet brought the solution in form of a database, where a pupil can save his result and contribute to the collection of results needed for Millikans observation. With this technology, developed by Xplora and available on Xplora's website, a student can now contribute to Millikan's nobel prize winning experiment.

With this experiment, Xplora has proved that the Internet can not only be used for information retrieval, but also for a kind of experimentation, such as collecting dust in school labs due to the lack of data availability. This experiment turns pupils to real researchers who work in a community with each other supporting the availability of results.
The hardware of the experiment was developed by Florian Glas, a physics teacher from the team of the AG Jodl (http://rcl.physik.uni-kl.de/) at the University of Kaiserslautern, with experience in the development of remote controlled laboratories for educational use.

For further information contact Karl Sarnow (karl.sarnow@eun.org).

The Millikan web experiment is freely available on Xplora's community. Register to Xplora (http://www.xplora.org), login and go to the web experiments section on the desktop. Information will be made available in major European languages. So far the information is available in German language only.

Xplora is hosted by European Schoolnet (http://www.europeanschoolnet.org) and financed by PENCIL,  a project of the European Commission.

More about the experiment
(http://www.xplora.org/ww/en/pub/xplora/news/latestnews/xplora_wins_grant_for_web_expe.htm)