As more and more schools and universities tried to return mid-2021 to in-person classes, the Rice/UH #QuarkNet center saw opportunities to return to an in-person workshop for high school teachers. With the support of the QuarkNet leadership and Rice's Physics & Astronomy department the very first "post" pandemic on-campus QuarkNet workshop took place in June 2021. 

This year we were thankful to gather in person at Florida State University July 28 - 30.  The workshop began with a focus on the g-2 experiment at Fermilab.  Ted Kolberg gave a talk on the experiment and the g-2 measurement's significance in the standard model.  In order to have a better idea of the concept behind g-2, Ted gave a review of angular momentum and precession along with a cool demonstration.

2021 was a bit of a revival for our Center at Virginia Tech!  After missing our workshop in summer 2020 due to the coronavirus pandemic, we were thankfully able to meet again (though virtually) in early August just before the school year started for the local school systems. 

This summer the Rutgers QuarkNet Center held two workshops on quantum computing for high school teachers, a two-week introductory workshop quantum computing attended by twenty high school teachers and and a one-week workshop attended by twelve high school teachers. The emphasis of the introductory workshop was on introducing the basic concepts of quantum mechanics and quantum computing and on developing methods for introducing this material into the high school classroom. The teachers gained experience using IBM’s Qiskit framework to program actual quantum computers.

We were not able to conduct a workshop in 2021, unfortunately. The summer period for Alachua County teachers was significantly reduced because of the impact of COVID, and PI D.Acosta was not able to schedule a workshop before end of July with our lead teacher. This will be Acosta's last year with the Florida center, as he takes a new job at Rice University. But the Florida group is working on a new center PI.

QuarkNet 2021

Johns Hopkins University

Jeremy Smith, Kevin Martz and Morris Swartz worked together to plan and implement the workshop, with the help from many at Johns Hopkins University and QuarkNet.