Follow-on 2017

or: We had a great masterclass, so now what?

This page is to help to guide teachers and mentors to lead interested students beyond the masterclass if they want to.

Navigation

Go to Project Map.

Organize.

There are many ways to put together an act to follow the masterclass but the first step is to organize. Here are some ways.

Teachers can

  • Make a class project
  • Create a new class lesson
  • Foster a smaller student group - like a Physics Club - that can meet after school.

Mentors can:

  • Invite interested students back for futher work
  • Visit the schools.
  • Meet up with teachers.

How you organize will influence what you do to folloe the masterclass. What you want to do will influence how you organize. Either way, a thriving teacher group helps support the effort and thriving student groups can do great things.

 

More data is more data.

There is more data out there - much more - and more was in which it can be analyzed.

Try another masterclass measurement.

If you have already done, say, the ATLAS Z-path measurement, you might try some of the others. How about the CMS J/Psi path? LHCb? You can find these and more at:

Analyze data in spreadsheet form.

Here are some spreadsheets with a limited number of 4-vectors from masterclass data. Students can use them to calculate invariant masses and make scatter plots of one variable vs another to see what they get. The following data is from CMS.

Here is an example of what students can do:

Use the spreadsheet of lepton-neutrino events. Calculate the mass of each lepton from four vectors using E2=p2+m2. Plot these on the same graph as a function of line number. You should get 2 mass bands for 2 different particles. What masses? How can you tell? Which particles are they?

Analyze data in e-Labs.

QuarkNet has facilitated three e-Labs, which are online environments for students to conduct rich, ongoing investigations using data from real experiments. They take some investigating and some getting used to. It helps greatly to have an introductory teacher workshop. Here are the e-Labs with links to people who can help.

Each e-Lab asks for credentials but you can log in as a Guest and use many of the features until you are ready to request your own account. You can find more information on e-Labs at http://www.i2u2.org.

 

Try something new.

LHC Open Data Portal.

In terms of amount of data, number of different formats, and variety of types, the LHC Open Data Portal just has more. Yet we still need to work out the best ways to use it. Go there. Try it. Experiment.

 

Virtual Atom Smasher

Virtual atom smasher is an educational activity that has been developed by Ioannis Charalampidis, Peter Skands, and Francois Grey. The team is now looking for high-school students who have been in masterclasses and would enjoy being alpha testers of the game. Encouraging your students would be appreciated! The project can be introduced to students by using a one-slide summary or a short presentation. Please guide your students to the signup page: They can register there and be contacted by the team as soon as the game is ready for testing.

 

Communicate.

The students have learned something about particle physics, the Standard Model, and the LHC. This may be time to share what they have learned even as they delve deeper. They can make presentations to other students (especially younger students), write (maybe on the International Masterclasses Facebook page), or make videos. You can find examples of the latter at the following sites.

 

Create.

If the above don't appeal, make something new. Write to us about it.