The African School of Fundamental Physics and Applications (ASP), a two-week school for about 80 upper-level undergraduate and graduate students throughout the continent, combined forces with Notre Dame’s QuarkNet this spring and summer for their program in Morocco.

QuarkNet, which began at Notre Dame and Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in 1999, is a national science program that partners high school science teachers with particle physicists. Kenneth Cecire, a national staff teacher for QuarkNet who works at Notre Dame, traveled to Morocco to assist ASP2024 with their outreach and education program for high school learners and teachers.

QuarkNet generally is geared toward professional development of teachers in the skills they need to introduce physics concepts to students, using data from the Large Hadron Collider at CERN as well as from other particle detectors. But QuarkNet also gears some programs, like ASP2024, toward students.

Ketevi Assamagan, the director of the African School of Fundamental Physics and Applications, and a particle physicist at Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York, invited QuarkNet to assist with the program. Cecire was supposed to teach the course in Morocco in 2020, but the global pandemic halted that trip.

“Some universities in some countries have very advanced capabilities, but on the other hand, some don’t have quite the same facilities,” Cecire said. “They have very smart physicists but their facilities are different, so that’s why Ketevi brought me, and eventually other people, on to do this outreach component for high school teachers and students.”

The collaborations also enrich QuarkNet, according to Shane Wood, another QuarkNet staff teacher. Wood is based in Minnesota.

“I recall talking with teachers in South Africa about successes and challenges in working with students these days, and it was surprising how similar the discussion was to those we have with teachers in the U.S.,” he said, referring to one of the programs he assisted with during a previous year.

This past summer, Cecire shared several hands-on learning opportunities that were simple, yet engaging. During one session, different teams worked with particle cards: each card represented a different fundamental particle, and Cecire and his team asked the group to organize them according to some of the characteristics printed on them. Examples of fundamental particles are a variety of quarks, electrons, neutrinos, and even bosons.

“This is sort of an icebreaker, but is really important because we want to start mentioning some of these particles and not throwing a lot of words at them,” he said.

One of Cecire’s favorite exercises that he did with the group was about probability with marbles, which simulated how physicists can use statistics to make measurements. The exercise demonstrated the technique that describes the sizes of objects based on how often they collide when moving in a defined area, he said.

“It’s fun to get to play with marbles, but this really demonstrates what we do to measure things, but translated to a scale we all can see,” Cecire said.

QuarkNet is supported by the National Science Foundation and by the Office of High Energy Physics, Office of Science, and U.S. Department of Energy through its support of Fermilab. In this way, the program is focused on the United States but has an international reach because of the way particle physics is researched.

For instance, in addition to teaching in Africa, QuarkNet staff work internationally to teach some “masterclasses,” or day-long events that bring together high school students and researchers to conduct measurements specifically from experiments at the LHC. This is because the physics data comes from international sources and the effort to analyze the data and understand the results is shared worldwide.

“We collaborate with the International Particle Physics Outreach Group, so we’re always reporting to them and getting their feedback,” Cecire said. “So we’re definitely trying to spread all of this worldwide.”

Originally published by Deanna Csomo Ferrell at science.nd.edu on October 07, 2024.