Session N61: Outreach and Engaging the Public

"Quantum Physics and Research Opportunities": a summer program for high school students

In this talk, I will discuss a summer program in physics for high school students from the Greater Detroit area. This two-week-long program took place in June-July 2023 at Oakland University, Michigan. It was intended for advanced students who had already taken Calculus in their high schools; most of the students (17 out of 22) were rising seniors. The program consisted of a series of lectures in Modern Physics, as well as research seminars given by the Oakland University physics faculty. I will describe my efforts to attract the students, the structure and curriculum of the program that I designed, and my daily experiences in teaching a group of motivated high schoolers. I will also discuss the challenges and lessons learned while preparing and running the program.   

How scientists can lead the effort to solve STEM education inequity in America

Education leaders are calling alarm to the lack of diversity in STEM. To address the issue, we need to look at K-12 education. Only 26% of American 8th graders are proficient in math (source); It is worse for students of color in under-resourced communities. 

What role can scientists play in solving this crisis? 

EnCorps connects STEM professionals with middle and high schoolers to counter the systemic injustice preventing children in under-resourced communities from accessing a high-quality STEM education.

The EnCorps STEM Teachers Program® supports STEM professionals who are committed to closing the equity gap. EnCorps Fellows teach various STEM subjects ranging from physics and math to computer science. Fellows are able to marry theory with practice.  More importantly, they serve as STEM role models.

With the EnCorps STEMx Tutors Program, STEM professionals and college students volunteer to tutor middle school math online to increase math skills and confidence prior to high school. The 2022-23 data shows results: 84% of students increased math proficiency.

Our 16 year history shows that STEM professionals can make a real impact on improving the diversity in STEM fields and combat the educational inequity that is prevalent in under-resourced communities.   

LabEscape: Science-based escape room for fun and (non-)profit

Based on APS seed money, and NSF support, in 2017 we established what we believe was the world’s first science-based "escape room": LabEscape. By interacting with physics components in the room, the participants uncover clues that allow them to complete their mission. In this latest chapter, they must enable and run a distributed quantum processor to create a vaccine for a terrible memory-erasing virus that has infected LabEscape protagonist Professor Alberta Schrodenberg! Beyond the initial goals – showing that science can be relevant and accessible (no prior background is assumed), aesthetically beautiful and fun – we also provide participants with the opportunity to learn what it’s like to be a scientist, and the importance of curiosity, communication and collaboration.  To date LabEscape has had nearly 11,000 ‘agents’, including several thousand STEM high school and junior high students, and received extremely positive feedback. Here we will describe some of the outcomes and our proposed future plans.   

Glass Art, Physics, and Marine Biology: Outreach using the Glass Shop as a Laboratory for Tissue Biophysics in Marine Animals

Glass art, physics, and marine biology are seemingly unrelated fields, but here we bring them together for the study of tissue mechanics in a marine animal. Manipulation of glass is an ancient art form that involves heating glass beyond its melting point, where it exhibits liquid characteristics, to create artistic structures, followed by annealing it to room temperature and recovering solid characteristics. The behavior of glass at its liquid-solid transition state has remarkable similarities to that of epithelial tissue under mechanical loading in a simple marine animal, Trichoplax adhaerens. This animal has a flat body plan consisting of two epithelial tissue layers enclosing a layer of fiber cells. In this work, our aim is to compare glassy dynamics and cellular strain in epithelial tissues of marine organisms. The choice of glass as a material to display tissue mechanics is motivated by glass being deformable at high temperatures in addition to exhibiting both ductile and brittle behaviors. Note that such specialized work is possible only due to the established techniques in glass shops. Previous experiments have shown that in T. adhaerens, at faster loading scales, ventral and dorsal fracture holes form in the epithelium. In-silico modelling of its tissue has revealed a ductile to brittle transition. In our experiments, glass is shaped in the form of cellular epithelium of the organism and is stretched at its melting point. The resultant structure represents tissue, under load, frozen at an arbitrary time point of cellular strain. Using this setup to model epithelial tissue behavior under lateral and radial stretch, preliminary area calculation of individual glass “cells” (canes) in the tissue was performed. The average cell area increased under load which confirms that glass “cell” experience strain under loading. Further strain analysis should show the effects of load on individual cells in a collective as expected from the perspective of tissue mechanics. The novel idea of using glass shops as a laboratory for visualizing and studying tissue mechanics promotes synergistic integration of Arts and Science which offers wonderful opportunities for inter-disciplinary education and broader outreach.   

Physics Wonder Girls Program: Celebrating Ten Years of Supporting Middle School Girls in STEM

On the occasion of its tenth year, the Physics Wonder Girls Program continues to stimulate and sustain interest in STEM and in paticular, physics, among middle school and high school girls. We report and reflect on the activities, programming and milestones of the camp through the last ten years, including during the pandemic. This year, the free Physics summer program supported 32 rising 8th and 9th graders selected from a pool of high-performing students in the Philadelphia-New Jersey region participated in an intensive week-long immersive program held on the University City campus of Saint Joseph's University in Philadelphia.Participants came from over 20 distinct schools. <any came from diverse, underserved communities and were introduced to renewable energy and the basics of solar cells, and built and tested solar-powered fidget spinners, solar cars, solar trackers, solar cookers, wind turbines, hands-on optics experiments and an introductory session on quantum information and simulations. Campers received a free kit of materials for projects and experiments, including a free digital multimeter. Campers interacted with physics and STEM majors who serve as crew, women physicists and engineers, toured R&D centers and manufacturing facilities of a multinational food company, and gave capstone presentations. Several past graduates of the camp returned to the camp as STEM professionals and college students, this time as speakers. We report on the products of the camp, status of graduates, program assessments, and where the program is headed in the future.   

Using ChatGPT-4 to help engage the public in your writing

Many researchers in Condensed Matter Physics and Materials Science find it extremely difficult to translate their research into a form which is accessible to the public.  It is important to realize that only 44% of adults in the USA have completed college, and of those only 18% of those were in STEM areas.  This means that if you consider the public as a whole only 8% have degrees in STEM fields.  Our typical mode of reporting on our research is to use too many buzz words, arcane language, and concepts (such as band structure or crystal symmetry) which are extremely abstract.  This makes writing for the public a very challenging and sometimes time consuming task.  In this presentation, we will discuss our experience with taking a typical report you might see on the NSF or PhysicsWorld websites and use ChatGPT-4 as a means for quickly making the first pass at this translation.  We curate the website FunsizePhysics whose target audience is an enthusiastic middle school student, or someone who graduated from high school.  We have found that using a prompt such as “Please take the following text and explain to me what it means as if I were a Middle School Student” can be an extremely effective and fast means for translating extremely technical text in a way which at least begins to be accessible to a middle school student.  It is possible to take that translation by ChatGPT and then edit it into a final form.  Our preliminary estimate is that it can save nearly a factor of four in the time required to translate something written for the NSF or PhysicsWorld in a way which is accessible and interesting to our target audience.   

Women Supporting Women in the Sciences: Outcomes from design and delivery of low-cost science laboratory kits for primary- and secondary-level classrooms in eastern Africa

Of women students in higher education globally, only about 30% select science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM)-related subjects, with particularly low enrollment in engineering, manufacturing, and construction (8%) and in natural science, mathematics, and statistics (5%).¹ Improving this representation is a multi-faceted challenge. Women Supporting Women in the Sciences (WS2) has been focused on spurring K-12 girls' interests in STEM and promoting women scientists as mentors to younger students. With the support of a 2020 APS Innovation Fund,² WS2 spearheaded the Lab Kit Initiative during which low-cost physics and materials science laboratory kits for K-12 students were designed and distributed to schools in eastern Africa. During the design phase, seven international teams composed of 59 volunteers (over 70% women) created 3 lab kits for primary level students and 4 lab kits for secondary level students on the topics of food science, electrostatics, light and color, and energy transfer. A key feature of the lab kits is the use of easy-to-source materials to ensure low-cost and wide accessibility. Working with eleven partners in Ethiopia, Kenya, Rwanda, Tanzania, and Uganda, WS2 provided lab kits that engaged over 5100 students at over 40 school sites in hands-on science learning, with 62% being girls. This talk will discuss the outcomes of the Lab Kit initiative which concluded in early 2023 and future endeavors in which WS2 has been involved that are broadening the reach of our lab kits.

 

Women Supporting Women in the Sciences (WS2)³ is an international organization unifying and supporting graduate and professional-level women and allies in STEM.

 

1.           Cracking the code: girls’ and women’s education in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) - UNESCO Digital Library. at https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000253479.

2.           APS Innovation Fund. at http://www.aps.org/programs/innovation/fund/index.cfm

3.           Women Supporting Women in the Sciences. at https://ws2global.org/   

FunSize Physics is here to help you share your science

FunSize Physics scaffolds scientists’ efforts in outreach and engaging the public by providing a platform for disseminating their research to a larger community that of the science curious public. The major thrust is the colorful, user-friendly website www.funsizephysics.com with the express purpose of showcasing exciting new developments in condensed matter physics to a broad audience of non-experts. The posts on the website start from research descriptions by the researchers themselves. The Funsize Physics crew add colorful, relatable pictures, and construct animations elaborating the physical processes. The combined efforts make the posts an efficient, low-bar Broader Impact activity, with the added benefit of providing metrics tracked by Google Analytics. Besides research posts, our website also offers posts on Fundamental physics and Activities. In particular, Activities posts provide step-by-step procedures for the public to actually “try” physics. They are also great for K-12 teachers’ classroom activities. If you are interested in sharing your ground-breaking science with a wide audience, FunSize Physics is here for you to realize that goal!   

Bringing the Public into the Quantum Realm: Marvel Magic Meets Mind-Bending Science

The February 2023 release of the Marvel Cinematic Universe film Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania presented a unique opportunity to engage members of the public with quantum information science (QIS) research. Never before had there been a film that featured quantum so prominently – right in the title! – and was guaranteed significant buzz and a huge audience. This talk will provide an overview of a communications and public outreach campaign organized by Argonne National Laboratory in the months around the release of the film, and reveal which activities were most successful in engaging public audiences. The campaign combined in-person events and social media content to explain real quantum phenomena and the QIS research going on at Argonne and other Chicago-area institutions. Events included a pre-release screening of the film organized in collaboration with Marvel Studios and The University of Chicago, a game-show style public lecture at Argonne, and an interactive panel at the Chicago Comic and Entertainment Expo (C2E2). Marvel-style videos and a Reddit Ask Me Anything were elements of a three-week social media campaign.   

Sharing STEM YouTube Content with China Through the Bilibili Video Platform

Over the past few years, the importance of good and effective science communication has become more and more evident. However, as the need for science communication has been growing, science communicators can find it hard to reach an audience, and even the most effective and popular communicators can have a hard time reaching a drastically different audience.

For the last few years, I have been helping Veritasium (popular physics educational channel with over 10M subscribers) cross political and cultural barriers to bring the content into China, and in the past year, the Veritasium Chinese translation team has expanded to help the Stand-up Maths (viral math focused channel with over 1M subscribers) and Steve Mould (successful physics/engineering channel with over 2M subscribers) YouTube channels. The rapid growth of both channels on Bilibili, a video sharing platform in China, suggest a strong interest in consuming STEM content from the Chinese audience. In this talk, I want to tell the story of the development for these channels and offer some insight in developing successful science communication content for a Chinese audience.

For more information on the channels, visit veritasium.com, standupmaths.com, and stevemould.com.   

Outreach mini-grant report: Physics of bicycles

Bicycle shops provide an ideal venue for physics outreach: Technically-minded people of all ages come to bike shops to learn more about their beloved nonlinear machines. Funded by a 2023 FOEP mini-grant award, we designed two posters and ran a hands-on workshop at Uptown Bikes in Chicago. We describe the poster creation process and workshop activities.   

Public Quantum Network

Quantum networks are being developed around the globe in order to facilitate cryptographic systems, improve metrology, and advance quantum computing systems. These networks have yet to be made readily available to the general public. We have developed a publicly accessible quantum network node, located in Urbana-Champaign. By introducing this cutting edge technology to the public, we create opportunities for public involvement in quantum experiments as well as develop interest in and exposure to quantum technology at younger ages. We utilize a polarization-based entanglement source located at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. One of the photons from the source is routed through fiber optic cables to the Urbana Free Library, a public library. In order to introduce quantum mechanics concepts we develop a series of displays, activities, and written resources that build up to quantum entanglement and encourage people to directly interact with photons in the network. These resources culminate in a projection measurement system located in the library, where the public can choose measurement bases and perform their own CHSH inequality measurements.