Transcript for:
CERN Education Program and Science Gateway Lecture Notes

welcome I'm going to um discuss today CERN education program CERN science Gateway and we have enough time to discuss also how to come to CERN what to do and so on and whenever you have a question as we have only 10 here just raise your hand and we can discuss the question immediately so um for those of you who have not yet been to CERN just two slides about CERN so CERN was created in 1954 with the motto science for Peace by 12 European member states and um nearly all of those member states are still members of CERN except jugoslavia which of course doesn't exist as a country anymore and can thus not be a member directly but nearly all of these successor states are still members certain member states put themselves together in order to um make a civil research a non-military research is maybe more more correct on nuclear physics which was at that point in time deemed to be pure weapons research and um since then CERN has grown we have currently uh I would say 23 and a half member states so we have 23 member states plus Estonia which which was already accepted as a member state but uh we did not raise the flag and they did not deposit the documents at UNESCO yet but otherwise we'll have 24 member states full member states of CERN need to be European States these are those 23 plus Estonia listed here and since about uh 13 years now we can have associate member states they can be in Europe but they don't need to be in Europe in total at CERN we are working together with more than 150 countries nationalities and um well you see a bit what are states we are working with and uh you also see a bit about cern's annual budget about how many people we have at CERN or we had at CERN in 2022 the number of the users explicitly went up uh significantly again I just remind you 2022 was the last year of something we called pandemic and uh also um it was 31st of December when most of our users are not even registered so um we're currently at around 14,000 and um CERN has also subscribed to the uh sustainable development goals of the United Nations and you see from time to time those uh pictograms on my slides showing a bit what we are doing there the uh users coming to CERN to perform research come of at about 2/3 a bit less than 2third from C member states and a lot of them come from Observer States um you see Russia is still there as an observer state but its participation is suspended now and um we'll see uh when and if that comes back now CERN as I said created from uh by by these European States was given four main missions fundamental research research at the frontier of human knowledge Innovative Technologies in order to perform that research collaboration for the good of humanity for the good of Science and and that's the main topic today education at inspiration for future generations and you can also put there a bit the sustainable development goals mainly this goal quality education is what we are going to talk about today just for the fundamental research the research questions currently being considered at CERN as the the main questions are the early Universe antimatter and dark matter and on all three fronts there is significant research coming now to education what do we do at CERN in terms of education and uh let me start with training we have lots of opportunities for students like administrative students that's typically Bachelor candidates technical students that's typically Master candidates uh we have a summer student program so as of beginning of next week the CERN cafeteria will be completely crowded from uh midnight to midnight and uh we'll have 478 I think uh summer students this year coming to CERN we have uh something which in earlier times we called fellows they are now called origin and Quest and also research fellows still and we are doing a lot on on this front tertiary education we also have a lot of C schools certain schools for accelerators for physics for data acquisition and so on but is that education would you say what I listed up to now is education or not who of you would would say yep that's education and that's all what you need to do none okay I should have asked the question differently maybe so of course my answer is no and why is my answer no that is because all of what I've shown is really training and continuous professional development and things like this but it's not education in a stronger sense so the question is what do we want to educate and of course you could imagine CERN doing education in particle physics but education in particle physics again is not really education so what would you educate and my answer to this was formulated by ANM uh something like 150 years ago or 38 years ago and to my understanding what we try to Ed should try to educate is the nature of science so what is the scientific method what is science at Large and uh if you find an earlier quote on what is nature of science I'm happy to take it but that's the earliest that I could find and that was ANM and he was really great in defining what the nature of science is and to my understanding what we need to educate now first question when we know what to educate or what is the goal whom do we we want to reach what do you think what's our goal whom do we want to reach with our education programs a general audience high school students I like short words yeah Society at large now the question is can we reach everyone no we can't of course we can't reach everyone so the question is do we find multipliers to do that and those multipliers teachers maybe that's the standard approach using teachers because that's the easiest way to do you can communicate to universities you can communicate to countries you can communicate to teachers and teachers communicate to students and there the question is which age and those of us who learned at some point in in English that there are pupils which are young students um in education research we are only speaking about students so in principle kindergarten you still speak about children and we start with kindergarten in fact but afterwards it's Primary School students so that's why I put which age here so we reach the students through the teachers and hopefully those students those people in school will go back home and talk to their parents and if that works and their grandparents and their great-grandparents and hopefully by that we reach everyone now one possibility and that's the one we did for a long time was getting people to CERN doing visits with visits programs we can cover about 13,000 visitors to cerns installations per year already last year we had more than 370,000 requests so we can't honor all of this so the question is how can we do things and what can we do so you see CERN is quite big all those white places can be in principle visited and we can explain things and we do that with the help of people who are authentically working on those experiments and then we get nice quotes like this one which is by Tom Hanks when he was shown around CERN and uh he was he was quite eager to look at at what we are doing there now 130 out of 370,000 is not a lot so we created something recently which is the CERN science Gateway so you see the the whole campus of CERN here and you see I'm not sure if my mouse is visible on that screen yeah it is so you see science Gateway here resolution is not too good but I couldn't refrain from taking one of my flight videos into here so that is uh science Gateway you see the globe in the center which also is part of science Gateway now and there in science Gateway we can now host far more people coming to CERN and wanting to learn about CERN science Gateway in itself is a new building which we inaugurated uh in October last year it's uh a 7,000 square meter area where where our first goal was to reach 300,000 visitors in science Gateway additionally to the um to the guided tours per year um if I'm not mistaken we are we were end of May at 200 something thousand already so it's quite a lot of people coming there and we are trying to to do a lot in science Gateway Science Gateway has a large where's my mouse a large Auditorium here where we can have science shows for example we have a large education lab and we have lots of exhibitions and also a Quantum exhibition where you yourself can get into the skin of a Quantum be tagged and go through a certain Labyrinth so when we boil that down to the uh to the education activities we have the education Labs here we have this part with with Hands-On experimentation and we have the the auditorium and the three main education activities we do at science Gateway covering at the moment at least the request is we have the labs I'm going to go into this a bit deeper we have science shows and we have some online learning connected to science Gateway so science shows are science shows that are educational so we don't just want to show roses in liquid nitrogen or balloons that are breaking because they are cool down but the idea of those science shows is to really explain what's going on and you see on the left hand side you see one show which is called uh a journey of journey through a detector um where you see how a particle behaves in a particle detector on the top right you see um our data science show where we tell especially younger kids how to how to deal with data what data is and uh on the bottom there is again the journey through the detector so these educational shows also exist in a transportable way so you can get some of them and use them also at festivals for example besides the science shows we have the lab workshops and we have lab workshops starting from five years of age for the general public to 105 plus I was told if I say 5 to5 that's discrimination so I believe I have to say 5 to8 currently but uh 5 to5 plus will do we have a lot of workshops for younger kids now we started with schoolb that maybe some of you know where we did lots of things for high school students but now we are doing more and more things for for smaller students and also for the General Public starting with this which we call mysteries of matter or seeing the invisible seeing the invisible is a uh a workshop where you need to find out what is the obstacle that we hit in there then we have one quite heavy experiment at CERN that we need to move and we do that by the power of air we have a science um a lab activity for that when we go to smaller children again we have this so This slime is a magnetic and B changes color when the temperature changes so to show that matter has different invisible properties we have right of that the uh our old standard experiment the cloud chambers that I think everybody who ever visited uh one of our teacher programs has built a cloud chamber we are doing robotics we are doing uh super conductivity workshops there are Lego workshops for the intermediate uh age range magnetism some standard physical phenomena and for the high school students there is also something where we do medical applications that is a p Workshop where you can find a tumor in a brain well it's of course not a tumor and it's not a real brain but you learn how to work with that and as you can see there are even bigger children who like those things and we had that was um a state visit of this gentleman from France accompanied by this gentleman the president of Switzerland at the time and our DG who were then afterwards really playing with the children how to program robots and how to measure invisible properties so we have 10 different lab workshops for 24 people each in the first nine months we already did nearly 800 workshops with about 177,000 visitors and as you can see a lot of them are School groups so the uh the top four lines are School groups that's already more than 50% and then we have student groups and we have open workshops where we don't look at the age this is workshops over the weekend where full families come and do workshops in the labs which is extremely popular now this is Walkin people and it's people doing visits and you can ask the question is that education or is that Outreach um it's somewhere in between the science shows and the lab workshops are definitely rather on the education side we have internship programs and we already also had an internship program for the Czech Republic in 2018 currently these internship programs are frozen but we are going to redo them these are two we internship programs for high school students that can come and really do a project in a department at CERN and we're trying to redo that now we currently have 24 Romanian high school students at CERN and uh we hope to to restart that and then we come to what several of you know already the teacher programs so we had from 1998 until end of last year nearly 15,000 teachers coming to CERN in um either International programs in summer or in the national teacher programs in the national languages which we introduced because yeah it's nice to have an international audience in an international teacher program but lots of the teachers from different countries they don't manage to really then pick up what they learn in these workshops they have to transport it first into their language and then they have to transport it to their students and as this is quite complex what we started in 2006 is national teacher programs and we are currently doing 35 weeks of national teacher programs per year and we cover in total but not every year 27 languages so um we hope that this helps a lot in order for the teachers to be able to be the multipliers for this education on the other hand during the pandemic we started to do online programs and we still have a few online programs the the main one that we still run is the Ukrainian online teacher program program of course they can't currently come to us and we can't go there so that we do online and uh we have also started a new program the south Asia Science Education Program going to South Asia and uh and do courses there now teachers let's get the group a bit wider again students can particip ipate in the beamline for schools competition this beam line for schools competition runs this year for the 11th time it's the 10th aniversary there teams of students up to nine students with two accompanying teachers can create an experiment can apply with this experiment for beam time at one of hour or DA's accelerators and then come and perform the experiment at PS or at Daisy uh for two weeks the winners of this year are already selected they will be announced end of next week and uh yeah it will be three very interesting experiments again that will be done at CERN and at Daisy now I said I want to reach everyone so what do we do with about the people who cannot come so during the pandemic we started virtual science shows so the idea was to use the pandemic as a great opportunity to to reach Those whom we cannot normally reach so we do live science shows online it's not taped it's really interactive with those schools who who want to participate and we continue to do that even though on a lower level for the moment because we just have too many people coming to science gate another way is to create lowcost material for the classroom um during the last day here uh we discussed already quite a lot about equipment in schools um but what we tried to do is for all countries to make something which can be used immediately in the classroom which can be either 3D printed or printed or get or just procured without too much budget like um here we have oops a rather for experiment with balls we have mystery boxes I have to I guess the pointer is where the mystery box is I have a video screen there um so mystery boxes you can do from 3 years onwards and you can easily 3D print them or build them with Lego which then makes it even more funny if one group of students builds a mystery box and another group has to experience it then we have a linear accelerator that you can 3D print we have a particle trap and lots of particle games gamification is one of the possibilities to to make this topic a bit more interesting and the one that I like most here in this is this 3D Puzzle where you have quarks and other particles and they only fit together in the way that they would in particle field Theory so you cannot put particles together in a wrong way now that reaches these schols that really want to do something like this now how do we reach even more people and we started the so-called CERN solvey education program and I think the video in here should start too yeah but we'll do that in a second this education program we had one Camp last week has three levels short videos um in portrait mode and uh why in portrait mode well quite easily um research shows us that students below 25 don't watch YouTube they watch Tik Tok and Tik Tok is Portrait so we do a first level of short videos which I'm just going to start here these videos allow home experiments to be performed with uh with everything you have at home just and uh relate to C technology in this case we are talking about Optical fibers and that's what you need um I cut the music here but there is no no other sound to to it then music then we have explainer videos so complete Muk with quizzes and those students who answer four quizzes correctly can apply to a student Camp so we have about 700 applications for each Camp which normally is annually this year we have two but uh normally it's annually that's 30 students from all over the world can come and do one week CERN visits and working in experiments so this student Camp the first one for this year happened last week the next one will happen in October and as well the short videos as well as the moo are available for everybody so with this we reach on average an audience of 60 to 70,000 students worldwide who take at least one of those quizzes so that's how we as far as we can go with reaching people another possibility is of course engagement of all the other actors so we we have all of those collaborations I think yeah that's all our education collaborations and you see I recycled this slide because that is a Swiss slide in principle I should have put J's picture here for the Czech Republic but I didn't didn't change it sorry um so there is a lot of different actors worldwide that are working on education and we are trying to work together with them as far as we can now are we sure that all of this is um effective well we accompany all of this by research so this means all of the programs are being researched by a team of doctoral students who are looking at the different impact motivation curiosity traits and um we do that in in many different ways and I'm just going to give one research example and uh this is an example where we ask the question what should the students and the teachers learn so the idea was to really find out what do scientists think that students should learn and what can they learn and where is the curriculum link so the methodology was quite easy we did a so-called concept map to find out with a large number of people um I don't remember how many actually uh to find out what should people learn about modern physics and conern physics in general and then do a curricular review so what is represented in Our member states in high schools so the concept map is that big it has nearly 90 Concepts and examples nearly 300 links and it has eight levels so it's it's quite complex and if you if you start looking at that you see if you want to uh understand particle physics you need to look at theoretical and experimental physics experimental particle physics mainly happens at accelerators um then you can go towards acceleration principles then uh you are on that Branch here you have then created Collision so you need particle detectors and we tried to find out with all those experts what are the different aspects that we need to to explain in order for students to understand what we are doing and in the end you come to the open questions not only in particle physics so the conclusion of all of this research was particle physics is a topic with which we can start to do to handle other modern physics topics and particle physics can be connected to other topics in a curriculum now the question is how extensively is particle physics featured in high energ in high school physics curriculum so we looked at 27 High School physics curricula with two independent reviewers each and you see already on the map that not a lot of countries mention particle physics explicitly and I think we did not research the Czech Republic I think that looks gray on here I don't know why um and we have a lot of countries with an explicit mention and without an explicit mention but when you look at that a bit deeper then you find that these Concepts does do not mean that there is nothing of this in the curriculum so you see history of particle physics is far more mentioned in countries where you don't have particle physics in the curriculum yeah because they just don't talk about the content they just say there is particle physics and it has this history the same of quantum physics and when you look at nature of science which was the goal if you remember then you see those who really look at particle physics then you also talk a bit more about nature of science so that was one example I can show you more later in the discussion if you want and if you were asking how many how many people are working on that this is as of this morning because that's when I count it through uh the size of the team that is doing education at CERN and you see we are we're quite distributed in in countries and uh yeah that's the team that we have and we are always looking for new collaborations so whenever you want to collaborate on particle physics uh part physics education research and uh how to how to convey um what we are doing at just come to us and I want to end with a slide of science Gateway with uh one of my my favorite quotes of a four-year-old girl talking to one of our guides after having been at science Gateway the picture was done by Chad GPT in fact um unfortunately at CERN we don't have uniforms or things like this so it it may made another uniform I would have put an EA one but that is probably too much jgpt but this is essentially the goal of all of this and that's the goal why we are doing all those things and now it's time for your questions and for the discussion I have some some more slides for discussion later if you want okay thank you thank [Applause] you really a room for question so please ask students who are passion for biology andic especially um at CERN in general definitely yes um there are there are experiments um looking into medical applications um there are experiments um that are looking at um at particle treatments at particle image at Medical Imaging there is possibilities in our knowledge transfer for that and and um uh actually the biologists that I know that are atern they mostly work in radiation protection and they are looking at things like this yeah okay thank you uh I just forgot the the hint that we should use the microphone in order to to transfer to the outside world the proper question there so the last the first question was about biology and medicine application and activities and that's incern so next question okay I have one fine okay uh so I have a question so uh near uh Globe just next 2.1 there is also this like a incubator or what's this new facility so is this somehow connected and used for education or training or yeah so you're talking about ideas Square yeah IDE Square which is which is not a new installation actually it's uh 13 14 years now that it's there but it was it started with an EU project um and it's kind of a design Factory so uh you have lots of possibilities for co-creation of activities there and we are starting to more and more use it for um for longer term education projects so um the design Factory Network where this is part of they are doing uh lots of co-creation developments with students all over the world they have programs that are called CBI challenge-based Innovation that means they take a challenge say from the Red Cross from any other organization and then with an interdisiplinary team of students tackle that and what we are trying to do more and more is to do also with student groups prototyping of their ideas so for example with the beam line for school students we go there partially and let them prototype things there it's a very open co-working space where we run internal programs but also programs for the EPS for example so the technology and Innovation group is doing some uh some training there and also there are hackaton happening at ideas square and ideas Square recently as it is now outside of the fence is also part of science Gateway so we are trying to do more integrated programs with them yeah thanks thank you thank you uh another question yes is there any possibilities that uh me as a person I can go to uh see like LHC um as a single person it's quite difficult but if you come with a group that's more possible um a visitor group needs to be 12 plus 12 to 48 um normally you have to decide about nine months in advance because that's more or less the time where we are booked out um the LHC is a bit difficult so the accelerator itself rather know the experiments down in the caverns in Winter and during a long shutdown so uh the next long shutdown will be 27 when we have then uh a longer time the possibility to uh to do underground visits otherwise in Winter for about two months there are underground visits and you can go and visit Atlas Alise lhcp and CMS CMS you can go into the underground all year but you cannot go to the experiment itself okay thank you very but I have another question to you could you briefly describe your situation because you are going to soon yeah well okay my I I'm glad you remembered my situation is that uh I got an internship into CERN through my University so I thought like it would be nice to have kind of a hands-on experience and to see what I'm working on MH uh what what do you mean by You' got an internship through your University I got the internship uh for being uh working on the production database on Project Atlas okay and you will come as a user then yeah no I will come as a as a student I'll be working of on the production database to maintain it and do the front end side Al so I thought maybe is there like any possibility for me as a intern to go actually in a person because I'll be working on the whole internship through the remote uh office ah you will work from here yeah ah um well that you the the first stage is getting to CERN you have to discuss with your University there I can't really help you okay if you are working on one of the LHC experiments um and you have the appropriate safety courses then also during the year we uh we have several times per year when we are doing some maintenance on the detectors on the accelerator where you as a member of personnel then can go down anytime during the year okay okay that that works okay thanks nice okay thank you so you would be a very special visitor very special okay another question no over there yeah I would like to ask uh how do you decide who gets to visit CERN as in like you uh said there's a great overhang of people and you have Al also mentioned some quizzes but how do you decide who gets to visit S so if we talk normal visits so visits to half day visit for example then it's really a first come first serve with some quota issues so this means we open the visits for the installation so science Gateway you can just show up and go to science Gateway go to an open Workshop go to a science show go to the exhibitions that you can do Tuesday to Sunday from 9 to 5: more or less if you want to do a guided tour somewhere on the premises then we open this exactly nine months in advance and every day we open it at midnight and uh you see there are schools who know that by now and uh so between midnight and midnight 30 there is lots of people clicking there now in principle this is first come first sered but we have a weekly quota on languages because all of our visits we try to do them as authentic as possible so it's volunteers doing those guided tours and the number of volunteers per language is varying quite a lot so we are trying to balance this out a bit but also we are trying when we accept the visit also to have a chance to have a guide in that language because especially for school groups say a Portuguese School group or take a Creek School group uh doing a visit in English doesn't really help yeah then you need the teacher to translate or at least somebody to translate it doesn't work so what we try to do is to make a quot by by language so I would guess yeah it's an educated guess um that if you come with a Czech language school that your probability is relatively high that you are accepted because there is not so much demand and we have a significant number of Czech language guides so the probability that you are accepted there is a bit higher than when you say okay I'm an english- speaking school and then you are really in this first come first serve and and quter thing um I can tell you from own experience if you try with a German group you have a severe problem because we don't have enough German speaking guides for example so French English and Italian we we cover quite a lot so there it's just we try to to keep space for the others but uh yeah that that's that's the whole thing Beyond time but uh I tried to um day before yesterday I tried to find a visit slot for a group um an English-speaking International Group and actually I even found still a slot in the months of June so it is possible but if you really want a specific day because for example your school has over I don't know Ascension a long weekend and you want to go to CERN you want to visit on the Friday the probability is relatively low that you get that because uh half of Europe has a long weekend then so um just try if it's if it's a day in the week without connection of a holiday concentration especially summer holidays um it's it's very probable that you also on a shorter notice get something if you are fixed on a date 9 months before to the day thank you and that applies to schools and student groups yeah so we can usually not make too many exceptions for universities universities get a bit better coverage because usually they put their students into a bus they bring their own scientists with them so by definition they have a guide with them so that sometimes works even on a week's notice we we saw that but again when you are in a peak period it's getting tough and uh I guess your University wants rather to do Atlas visits which are in the term of underground visits the most complex of all because a group is only six people going down together and then if you want to get the bus down you need eight hours and uh that's just a long time so at CMS you can go on go down with 48 at the same time so it's uh a bit different what you want to see so uh also look at the website what are the different possibilities what you want to see and maybe maybe be open for things maybe uh a visit to the antimatter Factory or to the computer center is easier to get than an atlas visit for example and then if you say I want to definitely visit Atlas the slots are smaller and that was I think too much Insight I mean you're recording that so okay thank you uh just maybe one comment uh because we organize quite many times visit with small group of teachers and say interested people and the group was typically say 15 to 20 people to ruse the number number ofou small groups to visit experiment and to use the break in performance of accelerators between say uh Christmas and say early early March or so and this was for several years and it may continue and I guess that Martin already also in organized such a group two years ago or something like that yes or yeah it was during pandemic actually and but I took on a bunch of like our undergrads uh from the Department yeah yeah and then uh I don't know whether you know uh what what is the number of visits organized by visit visit office from Czech Republic because my guess is small units or at least small T maybe during a year I don't know the number but I can I can look it up in a just afterwards just just one more trick if you come by bus have your own bus your possibilities get more yeah because we don't have buses in the visit service anymore so if you come with your own bus you can visit for example the uh neutrino installations so the preparations for the Dune experiment in pra in our second lab which you can only do when you have your bus you can visit um sm18 where we integrated all the magnets for the LHC you can visit on the pr side the AMS control room and uh maybe even witness um a Space Walk of astronauts on the ISS you can visit the C control center for example so if you come by bus and I think coming from brag by bus is not so difficult we have we have groups from Finland coming by bus so I think you about halfway of that so so you might be able to do that and uh then your possibility of seeing interesting stuff goes up quite a lot