The exhibition "The beginning of everything ", which runs from October 2016 to August 2017, has been created in collaboration between the Natural History Museum Vienna and the Institute of High Energy Physics (HEPHY) of the Austrian Academy of Sciences and was visited by more than 300 000 people including about 120 000 children and youth until mid-March2017. โThe beginning of everythingโ...
With over 3,000 members from 178 institutes, the ATLAS Collaboration is naturally diverse. However, capturing this diversity through pictures can be a challenge. Photography is a powerful tool, allowing us to reveal the faces behind a story and give the public the unique opportunity to understand and appreciate the human aspects of ATLASโs scientific research.
The role of photographs in...
Science education research suggests that STEM learning for young students may be especially enhanced through the combined use of inquiry and creativity in formal and informal settings. Consistent with the increasing emphasis on interdisciplinarity and the integration of the arts into STEM instruction (from STEM to STEAM), the CREATIONS initiative within the HORIZON-2020 framework brings...
CREATIONS is a three-year long European Union funded project, which aims to increase the young peopleโs interest in science. Sixteen partners from ten European countries develop creative approaches based on science and art for an engaging science classroom. The project is now in its 2nd year and a variety of events have already taken place. We have been developing advanced digital tools and...
The junior community in ALICE at the LHC, consisting of early-career scientists, forms an important and active body within the collaboration. It organizes a rich program with analysis tutorials and physics publication discussions. It also provides a collegial atmosphere for junior scientists to present their work and have lively discussions. In addition, the group is a vital element for junior...
The vast majority of high-energy physicists use and produce software every day. Software skills are usually acquired "on the go'' and dedicated training courses are rare. The LHCb Starterkit is a new training format for getting LHCb collaborators started in effectively using software to perform their research. The initiative, combining courses and online tutorials, focuses on teaching basic...
Educational research has shown that girls are less likely than boys to take up science subjects in high school, in western countries, as shown e.g. by a UK [study][1] by the Institute of Physics. This has repercussions on professional choices made later.
For some years now CERN drives a variety of communication, education and outreach activities to encourage girls to take science subjects in...
The LHCb Collaboration created an office with a mandate to advise and assist on issues related to Early Career, Gender & Diversity (ECGD) in September 2014.
This includes several activities within the Collaboration:
- Helping early-career physicists succeed, both in Academia and outside HEP; e.g. setting up a mentoring programme within the collaboration, and organizing meetings with external...
The Institute of Physics (IOP) has a longstanding interest in diversity issues, particularly around the participation of girls and women in physics, who are under-represented in physics education and employment. In 2003, the Institute introduced a Site Visit scheme, in which selected panels visited physics departments and produced a dedicated report on their โgender inclusivenessโ. After two...
The WiSE program at Syracuse University encompasses a broad spectrum of activities designed to develop the unique strengths and overcome the challenges that women in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) face at every stage of their education and career, from the beginning of their undergraduate studies to accomplished professional roles.
Key goals of Wise are an...
The XMaS Scientist Experience was conceived as an impact project aimed at promoting career aspirations for 17-18 year old female school students. It was centred around the XMaS Beamline which is located at the European Synchrotron Radiation facility in Grenoble, France. The competition asks entrants to research a famous female role model and describe her impact to science and 14 successful...
Science opens new windows on the world, but we must open new windows on science if we are to engage hard-to-reach audiences and improve diversity. Based on the detailed findings of the ASPIRE report from Kings College London, STFC's new Public Engagement Strategy recognises the need to engage young people earlier and more effectively to deliver the message that science is for everyone. ASPIRES...
Given the quite limited number of permanent positions in HEP, is it really possible to be gender/diversity-inclusive? And what about people with a disability?
The High Energy physics community in Colombia and in Latin America in general is steadily growing with stronger Physics programs and a larger participation in worldwide international collaborations and experiments. Along with these developments, great effort is being put into education and outreach activities that inspire the public and motivate the next generation of students to pursue a...
Among the scientific divulgation activities of National Institute of Nuclear Physics of Naples (INFN-NA), the installation of the underground cosmic radiation telescope at the Toledo Metro Station in Naples in 2014 had a major impact on territory. The detector,consisting of 10 xy scintillator planes, read by SiPM, was developed by the National Laboratory of the Gran Sasso (LNGS), and installed...
As particle physicists are, even those who work on the communication on particle physics are always involved with the traces of something. Images have an increasingly important function in communication through both traditional and new media, and play an even more relevant role in building a good storytelling. Unfortunately - thatโs a well-known evidence - particles and forces of nature are...
On Monday March 20th 2017, an outreach event dedicated to the gravitational waves and their recent discovery by the LIGO-Virgo collaboration took place. Jointly organized by the โCentre National de la Recherche Scientifiqueโ (CNRS) and the โSociรฉtรฉ Franรงaise de Physique ยป (SFP), it was targeting the general audience with an emphasis on high-school students and teachers. The key feature of this...
In 2014 CERN has started to organize โBeamline for Schoolsโ (BL4S), an annual physics competition for high school students aged 16 and up. In the competition, teams of students from all around the world are invited to propose an experiment to CERN that makes use of a secondary beam of particles with momenta of up to 10 GeV/c from CERNโs Proton Synchrotron (PS). The students have to describe...
SโCool LAB (http://cern.ch/s-cool-lab) is an international out-of-school hands-on particle physics learning laboratory at CERN, Geneva, Switzerland. It aims to give an insight into the working methods, technologies, and research of the world's largest particle physics laboratory and to make CERNโs physics and technologies understandable for high-school students through hands-on...
The Higgs mechanism is introduced in a completely classical framework in which the concept of energy is reviewed. After a brief review of the classical energy of a particle in a gravitational or electromagnetic fields, we show that postulating the existence of a new field (the Higgs field) one can easily introduce a new term in the energy that is consistent with the relativistic energy at rest...
With the advent of higher energies and higher collision rates the LHC continues the exciting voyage towards new physics, allowing physicists all over the world to explore a previously unknown territory full of promise.
So far the IPPOG international masterclass developers, with the help of physicists and in close contact with teachers, have been successful in designing educational material...
Particle physics outreach can play a key role in promoting scientific culture and in the modernisation of university education in Latin America. In this context, the CEVALE2VE virtual community (Centro de Altos Estudios de Altas Energรญas in Spanish) builds collaborative networks with and between Latin American institutions and motivates physics undergraduate and master students to consider a...
In recent times the realisation that children make decisions and choices about subjects they like during their primary school years became widely understood. For this reason academic establishments focus many of their outreach activities towards the younger ages. During the last academic year we designed and trialled a particle physics workshop for primary schools. The workshop allows young...
Traditional communication channels are now co-living with new ones, such as social media. These are channels through which communication is fast, impactful and interactive. Itโs commonly thought that they are mainly used by young people, but now there is an additional increasingly high demand of reliable and easy to understand information on social media by adults. Scientific research results...
Informing science and also nurturing the sympathy to scientific activities could be an important background to raise the fund, recruit staff and acquire the land to build the large research infrastructures. Mass media plays an important role in this communication, that is, the media relation is very important for scientific community to build good relation with the general public, and public...
Communicating HEP results to the general public often relies upon a simplification of the physics behind it. In the long term can be this an issue e.g. for resources given by the funding agencies.
