A particle physics course for high-school students
ppc.web.cern.ch
ppc.web.cern.ch
Your educational experiment involved 54 schoolchildren, aged 15-17, who were randomly selected from around 1,000 applicants, from 36 UK schools – mostly state schools. The teenagers spent two hours a week in online classes and after eight weeks were given a test using questions from an Oxford postgraduate quantum physics exam. More than 80% of the pupils passed and around half earned a distinction. Were you surprised by their success?
At one point, I was going to call off the whole thing because I thought it was going to be a complete disaster. We’d originally wanted the kids to interact with each other on social media or communicate online, but that wasn’t allowed due to the ethical guidelines for the experiment. I thought, what sort of educational experience is it, if you can’t talk to each other?
This is the Covid generation: none of them put their cameras on [for the online classes], so we were looking at a black screen. None of them asked questions using their voices, they just typed. It was a difficult teaching challenge by all standards. We also saw a self-esteem problem with the students. But the majority of kids liked that we had announced that you didn’t need a complex maths background. The maths had been a barrier to kids who had wanted to access this knowledge.
And then we got back the numbers. They did significantly better than we see from university-level students. Exams were marked blind, so we don’t know how many came in with the aim of pursuing Stem. We are processing that data now.
I'd guess that if someone tried to take the entire exam it would include things that do require "complex math" (whatever that is). But you don't have to get to the parts of QM that require such math in order to cover things that exhibit the meat of QM, such as superposition, entanglement, and uncertainty principles. I'd guess that it was those kinds of things covered for these students and that is what they were tested on.
> This article is concerned with a new language for quantum, to which we refer as quantum picturalism (QPict) [5]. It is the subject of two books written by some of the authors, respectively entitled Picturing Quantum Processes [10] and Quantum in Pictures (QiP) [9]. The first one is the text book of an Oxford University postgraduate course that has been running for well over ten years now. The second one, remarkably, has no mathematical prerequisites beyond what is already taught to 6-7 year olds in the UK, namely angles
[1] https://mmathphys.physics.ox.ac.uk/sitefiles/advanced-quantu...
[2] https://oxford24.github.io/assets/act-papers/49_high_schoole...
That QPict Quantum picturalism (2009) paper is https://arxiv.org/pdf/0908.1787 .
Picturing quantum processes - A first course in quantum theory and diagrammatic reasoning (2017) is https://www.cs.ox.ac.uk/people/aleks.kissinger/PQP.pdf (900+ pages; only 24 MB). Slides accessible: https://www.cs.ox.ac.uk/ss2014/programme/Bob.pdf ; slides technical: https://www.cs.ox.ac.uk/people/aleks.kissinger/slides/pdf/ak... .
Quantum in Pictures (2022) does not appear to be available open access.
String diagrams of category theory potentially make working with invariants easier by embedding them in graphical transformations, so they "just maintain themselves". Eg, electric circuit laws.[2] Or here, ZX-calculus/diagrams for QM.[3]
[2] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2106.07763 [3] Medium article: https://medium.com/quantinuum/how-zx-calculus-reveals-the-lo... ; A taste (guest lecture notes): https://arxiv.org/pdf/2303.03163 ; old slides https://www.cs.ox.ac.uk/people/aleks.kissinger/slides/pdf/ak... ; ZX-calculus for the working quantum computer scientist (2020; 90+ pages) https://arxiv.org/pdf/2012.13966
Major milestone for ZX-alike calculi: now for all finite dimensions, with completeness theorem. I.e. for all dimensions any equation derivable using Hilbert space maths, is derivable with pictures! ZXW moreover allows for differentiation, integration and exponentiation.
Here's the eigenfunctions and energy levels of the wavefunction for a hydrogen-like atom[1], equations derivable in the Hilbert space formalism which explain the Rydberg formula[2] and offer a path toward understanding molecular bonding. This stuff is usually covered in an introductory quantum mechanics course, which immediately requires you to work with infinite dimensional Hilbert spaces.
The process calculus stuff is neat, but it's not really covering what you might call "quantum physics". The mentioned textbook says it's "about telling the story of quantum theory entirely in terms of pictures", but it doesn't even mention what quantum theory is about. It starts with saying a photon or an electron might be a typical system, but what's a photon and why do we think they exist? What does it mean to say electrons are quantum systems, and why do we think they are?
A standard introductory text like Griffiths (which is also kind of unmotivated but at least covers the material) has e.g. this problem 5.11a: "Figure out electron configuration for the first two rows of the periodic table (up to neon)".
[0] https://www.cs.ox.ac.uk/people/aleks.kissinger/PQP.pdf
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen-like_atom#Non-relativ...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rydberg_formula#For_any_hydrog...
> and after eight weeks were given a test
Was the test remote or in-person? I've seen children (and adults) cheating even for stupid tests that have no grades/prices/whatever.
IMO This is one of the most depressing things about teaching teenagers online in real-time. But I don't know what we can do about it. Should we adapt to it? Are there any benefits to enforcing the cameras and voice dialogues?
One example: for online teaching, that may require a streaming model where there's a live, mostly uncensored chat where they can keep side conversations going and react to the material. I'm not sure if that model would be of use, but I do know that trying to get teenagers to engage requires the same thing it always has, which is taking them seriously as adults and not censoring them.
The "famously bizarre" parts are the parts that tie it back to the questions that first motivated it, e.g. what is "stuff" made out of, why do molecules behave the way they do, and how to reconcile that with naive predictions you might have from Coulomb's law.
Programs like this education experiment are essential to maintain interest in these big science projects that can take decades of planning and execution. A sliver of hope for humanity that we are still willing to collaborate on such a massive scale to deliver and run such projects.
Well done everyone, apart from the person that decided the home of the internet was not capable of self hosting the videos.
Anyway, it's a great effort! And it makes me happy to see how seriously they take it.
Since I have near 0 knowledge in the matter, I might actually take it.
“ Subtitles are available in all languages! Simply switch on closed captions and select the auto-translation of the original subtitles in your preferred language.”
I think each speaker has its native language and hence this is the universal access approach.
I did wonder whether their native language is English. But English good for me. Well we are not commenting on …
Sure that’s what you use to talk about particle physics, but this is targeted towards kids and by doing this the “Organisation européenne pour la recherche nucléaire” makes it harder for French, Swiss, German etc. kids to follow.
It should not be hard to do a voiceover, at 4h I’d even volunteer.
I mean, wouldn't any language they choose exclude others?
They should include more languages than just English, but French is not by default the more obvious choice.
But seriously, it's obviously meant to have a wider audience than just those countries you mentioned. Not even mentioning the elephant in the room that they are funded by many other eu countries (~23) that have their own languages as well. What else besides the most international language in the world should they have chosen?
I just wish that for non English speaking kids there would be more resources in their native languages, especially since mathematical interests and interest in languages rarely are equally strong.
The fact that the US has such a large unified one language market really gives them an edge when it comes to creating content.
It would be stupid to ask American educators to provide content in language irrelevant in their country; but given that France, Italy and Germany together provide for 40% of cern budget wishing for human made subtitles surly is nothing outrageous.
For kids below 16 ... I agree. My 7 y.o. is studing some English at school and sometimes she watchs cartoons in English, and she aparently understand most of it. But watching technical stuff is more difficult.
OTOH, it’s a huge advantage to learn technical English early on. It’s the language of computers, engineering, science, math, business.
1. Watch the video with subtitles in your language.
2. Record audio of you reading the subtitles in time with the video.
3. Upload your recording as YouTube video or to an audio hosting website
4. Post a link to your recording, as a comment on YouTube and in a message to the producers
Optional: Download the video from YouTube using available tools, and merge your audio track into the video, and re upload it.