Report on the 2006 AAPT Apparatus Competition

Each year at the AAPT summer meeting there is an apparatus competition in which members of the physics community can share ideas for new or improved apparatus to aid in the teaching of physics. The 2006 competition at the summer meeting in Syracuse, NY, was the largest competition in quite a while and continued an upward trend in the number of entries. Entries ranged in complexity, cost, and target audience, from a $20 apparatus for experimenting with standing waves on the surface of water, to an open design of an atomic force microscope (Fig. 1), which was also relatively low in cost (as far as AFMs go) at around $15,000.