Bulletin of the American Physical Society
APS April Meeting 2019
Volume 64, Number 3
Saturday–Tuesday, April 13–16, 2019; Denver, Colorado
Session B13: Outreach and Engaging the PublicOutreach Undergraduate
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Sponsoring Units: FOEP Chair: Chad Orzel, Union College Room: Sheraton Plaza Court 2 |
Saturday, April 13, 2019 10:45AM - 10:57AM |
B13.00001: Quantum3: Learning Quantum Chromodynamics through Intuitive Play Huey-Wen Lin There is a nationwide drive to get more girls into physics and coding, and some educators believe gaming could be a way to get girls interested in coding and STEM topics. This project, sponsored by NSF, is to create a Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD) game that will raise public interest in QCD, especially among K-12 girls, and increase interest in coding among girls. Through the immersive framework of interactive gameplay, this QCD phone game will allow the public to peek into the QCD research world. The game design will fall into the ``Match 3'' genre, which typically attracts a higher ratio of female players. The game will be implemented initially as a phone app, and the gameplay would require learning simple QCD rules to progress. By leveraging the willingness of players to engage with the rules of an entertaining game, they are able to easily learn a few principles of physics. |
Saturday, April 13, 2019 10:57AM - 11:09AM |
B13.00002: Science as an Institution Nathan Foster This past summer, I worked as an intern for the American Institute of Physics' FYI science policy newsletter. FYI is a small but extremely productive group of four reporters who write about funding, policy, and personell decisions in the world of government-funded physical sciences research. As an intern taking notes on everything from Congressional hearings to lobbyist events, writing blurbs, and occasionally writing full articles, I was lucky enough to have a front row seat to many of the political dynamics shaping American physics. Science policy is often inaccessible, sometimes intentionally so. But decisions made by Congress and government agencies deeply affect scientists, and they determine how our work impacts the broader world. In this presentation, I hope to shine a light on how funding and policy decisions are made, who they are made by, and who, ultimately, they are meant to benefit. I will discuss specific issues I reported on this past summer, from a proposal to privatize the International Space Station to concerns about Chinese scientific and technological competition to the movement for open science. |
Saturday, April 13, 2019 11:09AM - 11:21AM |
B13.00003: Particle physics outreach in the cloud with Google’s Colab environment Daniel Whinnery, Tyler Sitterly, Matthew Bellis Particle physics is different from other scientific fields in that it is very challenging for students to directly engage with data. Unlike astronomical images that immediately capture the imagination, the details of relativistic kinematics can impede further exploration. Since 2014, we have maintained a website, Particle Physics Playground, which gives users access to simplified data from the CMS experiment, and the since-shuttered BaBar and CLEO experiments. Visitors interface with the data using python, Jupyter notebooks, and simplified accessor functions that we provide for them. The target audience is high school or undergraduate students who have some exposure to, or willingness to learn, python. In the summer of 2018, the website underwent an overhaul; most significantly the notebooks were moved to Google Colaboratory (Colab), an online environment that allows users to write and execute code, all on Google’s servers. This means that these datasets can now be accessed with something as simple as Chromebook. In addition, explanatory videos were created that help users get started with both Colab and the analysis tools themselves. The current status of this project will be discussed. |
Saturday, April 13, 2019 11:21AM - 11:33AM |
B13.00004: Leveraging the International Year of the Periodic Table Micha A Kilburn The United Nations has declared 2019 the International Year of the Periodic Table to commemorate 150 years since Mendeleev first created the table. Chemistry departments and organizations are capitalizing on the celebration to promote their field, and there are a number of ways physicists can as well. I will discuss a variety of ideas for outreach events that highlight the role of physics and astronomy in the discovery and understanding of elements. I will also present some existing activities, such as a nucleosynthesis game, that are ready to be implemented by researchers and departments. |
Saturday, April 13, 2019 11:33AM - 11:45AM |
B13.00005: HEP Takes The Hill: A Case Study in 21st-Century Advocacy Justin Vasel, Fernanda Psihas Every spring for the last 40 years, a group representing the U.S. high-energy physics community travels to Washington, D.C. to sit down with legislators and staffers to advocate to continued federal support for HEP research. Conducting publicly-funded research is a privilege, so outreach is a vital component of our work. That includes reaching out to legislators who appropriate the funds that drive that work and sharing the success, impact, and future plans of our field. In practice, 50 physicists meeting with 535 congressional offices is a non-trivial logistical challenge. Enter WHIPS: the Washington-HEP Integrated Planning System. WHIPS is an all-in-one feature-rich toolkit for planning, executing, and analyzing these advocacy trips. Built with Python, WHIPS is a modern web app, accessible by browser on any laptop, phone, or tablet. Since its development in 2018, WHIPS has significantly improved our ability to build relationships with congressional offices. In this talk, I will explain how WHIPS works and why it is such a powerful tool for this type of advocacy. I will also share some of the lessons we’ve learned along the way and tips you can use to take your advocacy to the next level. |
Saturday, April 13, 2019 11:45AM - 11:57AM |
B13.00006: Characterizing the Landscape of Informal Physics Activities that are Supported by Universities, National Physics Laboratories and Centers in the United States Kathleen A Hinko Many individual physicists, physics students, and broader physics institutions engage in physics outreach with the public as well as support other types of informal physics learning. As a field, however, we do not have a holistic picture of the landscape of these outreach efforts and the resources, time, and personnel that go into doing this work. Thus, we are unable to leverage these collective efforts or to understand the full impact on participants, both the public audiences and the physicists involved. Here we discuss a new project to systematically describe the "who, where, when, how, and why" of the informal physics programs that we engage in. Survey, interview, and site visit data from informal physics events, programs, and activities are being collected and analyzed to 1) produce a taxonomy of informal physics and 2) reveal the structural and cultural practices that support these environments. We will share preliminary efforts as to program identification, data collection, and analysis. We also put forth a call to join the project and contribute to the study. |
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