QuarkNet in BNL
By Helio Takai
I
am sure that many of you have heard about QuarkNet, or at least
I hope you did. QuarkNet [1] is a particle physics education and
outreach program that started in 1999 and it has been growing in
size ever since. Its main goal (as stated in the web site) is to
bring together high school students, teachers and physicists to
explore the hidden nature of matter, energy, space and time.
That said, when BNL joined QuarkNet in year 2000, we had little
idea of what we were getting into.
We started our activities in BNL by offering a 2 week long workshop for high school physics teachers. Having never made contact with the teaching community before we offered a workshop that dealt mainly with the Standard Model and current topics in high energy physics. We were pleasantly surprised when we got a good turn out. Later we learned that this was caused by the introduction of particle physics in the high school curriculum by the New York State department of education. In the following year, only a few die hard teachers remained in the program and we were wondering about what happened. The message was clear. Besides English, we discovered that there was very little in common between what we were offering and teacher's interest.
The QuarkNet model is to create communities of scientists and teachers with the clear goal of improving physical science education in the classroom. Through one of the early QuarkNet students who is now pursuing a PhD in Science Education I've learned that this means "Bringing Authentic Science into the Classroom" [2]. This might be interpreted as bringing Higgs search, or RHIC physics into the classroom but it has a deeper meaning. It means approaching science in the classroom the same way is done in research institutions. With a gap of the size of the grand canyon between the two communities the question that we faced was how to achieve that.
In the third year, our workshop was redesigned with the help of few good teachers. Lectures in their vast majority were replaced by a series of small experiments carefully designed to include the steps for data collection, analysis and interpretation. Counting the number of pops per unit time of microwave popcorn gave us a good way to explore statistics and measuring the height of beer froth (non-alcoholic for BNL) as function of time introduced teachers to exponential decay. Particle physics were introduced very nicely by using a cloud chamber with magnetic field. Presentations on Standard Model, LHC and Fermilab were still part of the workshop but speakers were asked to prepare presentations to engage the audience in discussions. The workshop was a success and it not only led to the introduction of materials into the classroom but the start of a community. Since then the number of teachers involved grew and our center has today approximately 30 teachers with different degree of involvement, with a core group of 15 who are very active.
Figure 1. Students and Teachers from Smithtown and Ward Melville high schools participate in the CERN Masterclass event together with teams from Krakow, Bonn, Trnava, B. Bystrica and Santiago de Compostela.
Today the BNL QuarkNet group is engaged in a variety of activities. A few of our teachers have taken part of a month long CERN's teacher's program learning about LHC first hand. Others participated in workshops at Fermilab on detector construction. Together the group is building the MARIACHI experiment on Long Island [3]. Teachers participate in the CERN sponsored Masterclass where students from local high schools video conference with their European counterparts on particle physics. Teacher's from our center have also visited the National Science Foundation on different occasions during reviews. They have participated in national and international conferences and have published papers. There is, however, the other side of the coin. I have been invited in many occasions to guest lecture at high schools, teacher's conferences and even in science fiction conventions. Frightening experiences, I must admit.
Figure 2. QuarkNet teachers develop a quark card game, "Hadron Hold'em". Cosmic Chris watches.
QuarkNet has taught me a valuable lesson. A stronger community of teachers and scientists can positively affect education. Our main role is to bring the best science practices into the classroom. But you have to get your hands dirty. It is the one-to-one contact with teachers that makes the difference. Through this intimate interaction I have learned that science is rooted on the student's curiosity for the unknown. I have also learned to appreciate science and its ramifications much more and broaden my interests beyond particle physics. It is unavoidable to develop a good picture of how the scientific community fits (or not) in our society. Our role in shaping the future of science goes beyond the participation in scientific conferences and workshops. Being part of communities of scientists and educators through programs such as QuarkNet will definitely brighten our future.
References
[1] QuarkNet Web site - http://quarknet.fnal.gov
[2] I. Rahm, H. Miller, L. Hartley, J. Moore, Journal of Research in Science Teaching, Vol. 40, 8, 737-756 (2003)
[3] MARIACHI experiment web site - http://www-mariachi.physics.sunysb.edu/
The Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider at Brookhaven National
Laboratory is a world-class scientific research facility primarily
funded by the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science. Hundreds
of physicists from around the world use RHIC to study what the
universe may have looked like in the first few moments after its
creation. What physicists learn from these collisions may help us
understand more about why the physical world works the way it does,
from the smallest subatomic particles, to the largest stars.