FNAL/UofC/COD Annual Report 2026

QuarkNet

Fermilab/University of Chicago/College of DuPage

Summer Teacher Workshop Annual Report 2026

The Fermilab/University of Chicago/College of DuPage QuarkNet Center held its annual teacher workshop for its 20th year.

The three-day teacher workshop was held from July 27th, 28th, and 29th.  QuarkNet Fellows Jeremy Smith and Michael Plucinski piloted a Neutrino/Machine Learning Camp for local center’s summer workshop and nine teachers of physics attended. Teachers from the workshop were primarily from the Chicago metropolitan area, incorporating physics in their teaching. A few teachers traveled to Fermilab for the event.  We continue to show variety in gender, age, and years of experience in the classroom.

The teacher workshop was successful in meeting on-site and in-person. Teachers participated in QuarkNet data activities, with emphasis on using Jupyter Notebooks designed to introduce students to techniques of Machine Learning & Artificial Intelligence by applying them to data from common high school physics experiments. The Teaching with Data workshop included a number of activities working towards the introduction of statistical analysis of data while learning physics.  We worked from introductory workbooks, through data gathered from the Phyphox cell phone app, through Matrices & Rotations and Damped Oscillators, to the analysis of data from the NOvA experiment. In addition, a number of physics education resources on the web were shared.  Teachers developed plans for continued improvement of the integration of physics research data into their classrooms. 

The Fermilab/University of Chicago/College of DuPage QuarkNet Center continues to provide a quality professional development workshop. Teachers continue to express enthusiastic appreciation.  

Spencer Pasero, Office of Education and Public Engagement

Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory

George Dzuricsko, Lead Teacher