We love particle physics. It is interesting, fascinating, and mind blowing. So can you imagine that there are students out there who are not interested in it? These students need our help! If they do not love particle physics for its own sake, we have to show them how amazing it is.
Thus, the aim of this project is to spread interest in particle physics.
Even though CERN conducts fundamental research, its technologies are applied in various fields. Considering the theme of the hackathon ‘working together apart: accelerating collaboration’, the focus of this project is on
- applications of particle physics, especially accelerators,
- how they influence our daily life (e.g. hadron therapy for cancer treatment, accelerators used in electronics, electron microscope), and
- how they contribute to peaceful collaborations all around the world (e.g. CERN, SESAME).
Aim: spreading interest in particle physics, while focusing on 1) applications with societal relevance and on 2) peaceful collaborations around accelerators.
Target group: students (middle and high school).
Idea: Creation of a quiz, questionnaire, game, … (It could be similar to the particle identities quiz developed by CERN’s S’Cool LAB team. You could use the open source game development platform GDevelop. => see links below).
One could for example answer questions like
- “Have you ever used xy?” or “Do you like xy?” or “Are you interested in xy?” with xy being things developed at CERN, and
- “Are you interested in ab?” or “Have you ever been to ab?” with ab being places or regions where particle physics research projects contribute to international and peaceful collaborations.
In the end, the participant gets at least one accelerator or a ranking of things that might be interesting or relevant for her or him. Similar to the particle identities quiz, the main question could be “Which particle accelerator fits your interest profile best?”.
In any case, free your creativity and have fun!
Steps:
1) Select min. 10 applications of and/or collaborations around particle accelerators.
2) Write algorithm of questions that results in a ranking of applications/collaborations.
3) Set-up online version of the quiz, questionnaire, game, …
Particle identities quiz: http://cern.ch/identities [1]
GDevelop (open source game development platform): https://gdevelop-app.com/ [2]
Applications: https://kt.cern/cern-technologies-society [3]
Collaboration: https://home.cern/news/news/cern/cern-congratulates-sesame-pioneers [4]
S'Cool LAB: https://scoollab.web.cern.ch/ [5]
[1] http://cern.ch/identities
[2] https://gdevelop-app.com/
[3] https://kt.cern/cern-technologies-society
[4] https://home.cern/news/news/cern/cern-congratulates-sesame-pioneers
[5] https://scoollab.web.cern.ch/