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This site was a result of many hours of hard work and a cooperative effort of PIRA (Physics Instructional Resource Association) members, Wake Forest University, Cal Poly University (Pomona) and the University of Minnesota.

Short History:
In 1988, Ina Abelar from Cal Poly University (Pomona), gave a paper at the National AAPT (American Association of Physics Teachers) meeting which inspired the creation of the "Demonstration Handbook Generator". Phil Johnson spearheaded this project, with Tim Courant at the University of Minnesota, between 1988 to 1994. Most of the pictures and materials on this site came from the hypercard stack originating from the "DHG".

The PIRA 200 comes from a 4 year effort of many PIRA members. Meeting once each year at the annual summer meeting of the AAPT, they created a list of the top 200 demonstrations most used by colleges and universities to teach physics. PIRA has done a lot of hard work gathering the information contained here. We hope that you will use this information as a guide in creating a good demonstration resource and/or site at your institution. We feel that your use of this material will make all our combined efforts worthwhile.

In an effort to reclaim some of this material and make it available to the public, Machele Cable, from Wake Forest University, and Doug Johnson, from Cal Poly University (Pomona), pulled together their resources to place all the PIRA 200 demonstrations on this site. This is the first time that this 200 list has been made available with pictures. All these materials are released for nonprofit educational use only. All pictures used for other nonprofit purposes, need to retain the signature of their creators as they are copyrighted, © 1993 - Regents of the UNIVERSITY of MINNESOTA and PIRA.

A partial list of those who contributed to the materials contained in the PIRA 200 is listed below. A hearty 'thanks' to them all for their efforts and please forgive us if we missed your name.

Demonstration Handbook Generator:
Tim Courant
Jodi Eineichner
Dick DeGeer
Becca Gowdy
Phil Johnson
Rob Loucks
Robert Netze
Mike Walker
University of Minnesota

PIRA Demonstration Classification Scheme Committee:
John Davis
Marsha Hobbs
Philip Johnson
Roger Key
Dave Maiullo
Zigmund Peacock
Michael Thomason
Karl Trappe
Kelvin Trefz
Keith Warrren

Website, Data Recovery, other Artists, Etc.:
Machele Cable cablem@wfu.edu
Douglas Johnson dcjohnson@csupomona.edu