2024 Annual Report
Rice/UH QuarkNet Center Annual Report 2024
The RIce/UH QuarkNet center is happy to report again a great interest from the local high schools in the two main events we organize yearly. Before we review the details of these two events, we will also highlight another QuarkNet event we hosted in December 2023. Together with the leadership team of QuarkNet, we organized a Physics Education Forum titled “Helping Shape the Future of Physics Education in Our Schools.” Sixteen teachers from about a dozen high schools attended a discussion about the successes and challenges of teaching physics and how QuarkNet and Rice University’s Office of STEM Engagement can help provide educational and professional development opportunities. The forum included a tour of some of the facilities Rice provides for its students, most notably its engineering design kitchen, a 20,000-square-foot space where students can engage in all phases of design processes.
In March, we again organized a masterclass for high school students. About 11 students and their teachers joined us for a day of lectures and hands-on opportunities to “see” particles and analyze actual data from the Large Hadron Collider. The campus tour included visiting the teaching labs for Junior Physics majors with demos of various particle detectors and a fantastic lunch show by Rice’s Physics On Parade (POP!), a group of faculty from our Physics & Astronomy department.
The annual High School Teacher Summer workshop once more provided an excellent opportunity for many of our high school teachers to learn about a wide range of physics through a number of dedicated multi-day workshops, daily presentations from Rice and UH faculty on new developments in cosmology, quantum computing, solar physics, and biophysics. The workshop concluded with a visit to the renowned Houston Museum of Natural Science. Not only allowed it the teachers to see in practice several of the topics that were covered that week, it also included a visit to the planetarium and a guided visit through some of its recent new additions. What is perhaps more important is that this year’s workshop included several new teachers who attended our December ’23 forum and got interested in the QuarkNet program.
We look forward to seeing their students attend next year’s Masterclass.
We are grateful for the continued support that our center enjoys from the QuarkNet leadership and the Rice Physics & Astronomy department. We look forward to many more new opportunities next year!