Description In today’s world, physics is boring for most people. But not just physics, pretty much any subject can appear to be interesting or boring depending on how it’s presented. How fascinating could a book full of equations and theoretical content possibly be, right? Humans by nature like challenges, we love the sense of accomplishment we get from working through a challenge and that’s when we learn most. So our goal is to build a platform where particle physics is presented differently. Our platform will allow people of all ages and different backgrounds to learn about particles by facing challenges with different experimental games. Observation affects reality - as physical laws don't control how particles behave, players are the ones who call the shots and observe what happens in some games. In addition, source code for the games developed on our platform will be open to the public. So people will get to learn particle physics and programming at the same time. Besides games, we’re also planning to share interactive infographics and blogs about unsolved problems and mysteries of particle physics that keep physicists awake at night.
We used Javascript P5 library which is a great tool to program interactive, graphical applications such as the simulation we presented as our learning platform.
The most challenging part during the hackathon was the implementation process of physics laws in programming and simulation to make sure that after collisions particles move exactly in the same way as it happens in real-world collisions.
The main accomplishment to be proud of is a well-rounded teamwork that we managed to set up. Currently, all of our team members are in different places but thanks to regular online calls, clear division of tasks and workload, brainstorming sessions and easy communication we were able to finalize the project in time and present the prototype of the product by the deadline. On a par with that, new knowledge acquired during this hackathon can also be considered as a great accomplishment since we were not quite familiar with quantum particles in depth before joining the WebFest, while now all of our team members have sufficient knowledge related to quantum theory, quarks, particles, charges and many more than this. By learning we become smarter, by teaching each other we become wiser and stronger as a team!
During the past 2 days we have mastered teamwork skills, as well as practiced videoediting, prototype building. It goes without saying that the most crucial part was related to the coding part taking into account the fact that it was the first time ever when we had to deal with the simulation of particles physics laws virtually and everything related to this scope of work has been learned from the scratch but despite that, we were able to make it and managed to present the final prototype of the platform by the deadline of which we are proud. Another key learning is undoubtedly related to the amount of gained knowledge related to particles and their behavior - the most exciting part of the hackathon.