[HN Gopher] A particle physics course for high-school students
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A particle physics course for high-school students
Author : treetalker
Score : 229 points
Date : 2024-12-04 03:49 UTC (19 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (ppc.web.cern.ch)
(TXT) w3m dump (ppc.web.cern.ch)
| ilrwbwrkhv wrote:
| Amazing stuff! I visited CERN this year on holiday. One of the
| few places where humanity's desire for betterment remains.
| niemandhier wrote:
| That is brilliant and beautiful, I just wished that they would
| not default to English.
|
| Sure that's what you use to talk about particle physics, but this
| is targeted towards kids and by doing this the "Organisation
| europeenne pour la recherche nucleaire" 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.
| 2143 wrote:
| What should they have defaulted to?
|
| I mean, wouldn't any language they choose exclude others?
| bowsamic wrote:
| French would definitely be the more obvious choice in this
| case
| mschild wrote:
| Both English and French are the official working languages
| of Cern.
|
| They should include more languages than just English, but
| French is not by default the more obvious choice.
| bowsamic wrote:
| Right, but there are other reasons why French is more
| obvious, not just "by default" but based on arguments and
| reasoning. Or has HN truly forgotten about these things?
| solveit wrote:
| The previous poster was actually inviting you to expound
| on the other reasons.
| ppppo wrote:
| I'm sure they have infinite resources and time to make it
| available in every language ever including braille.
|
| 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?
| niemandhier wrote:
| Adding a language does not exclude another? I completely
| understand that you do the videos in English and for adult
| audience that's great, but for kids below 16 it's a bit
| challanging.
|
| 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.
| gus_massa wrote:
| YouTube is doing some auto-dubbing. It detects I'm in
| Argentina and it shows the autranslated Spanish version. I
| hate it. It's not bad, a little robotic, but not bad.
|
| 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.
| FredPret wrote:
| It's much easier to learn complicated things in one's
| native tongue.
|
| OTOH, it's a huge advantage to learn technical English
| early on. It's the language of computers, engineering,
| science, math, business.
| scionthefly wrote:
| This is version 1.0. CERN education has a great track
| record of native language activities and will no doubt
| expand to other languages assuming this course is
| successful and useful.
| cjfd wrote:
| Well, it says 'pilot version' so maybe there will be a more
| definitive version later that is available in more languages.
| lupire wrote:
| Volunteer accepted!
|
| 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.
| demaga wrote:
| It's only 4 hours? I expected it to be longer, even for an
| introductory course.
|
| 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.
| ngcc_hk wrote:
| Strange about the comments.
|
| " 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 ...
| mamediz wrote:
| I'm surprised about the auto-translation, it's working great.
| However, unforntunately I think there is no option to auto-
| translate the quizzes.
| ValentinA23 wrote:
| https://www.theguardian.com/science/2023/dec/16/physicist-bo...
|
| 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.
| kitd wrote:
| Now I have questions about the Oxford postgraduate quantum
| physics exam :)
| sesm wrote:
| Exactly, how can one pass a postgraduate level exam 'without
| complex math'?
| tzs wrote:
| It didn't say their exam was an _entire_ postgraduate exam.
| It said they passed an exam consisting of questions _from_
| a postgraduate exam.
|
| 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.
| elashri wrote:
| I have doubt that anyone with a high school maths would
| even understand any of these (2023 MSc QM level Oxford
| exam) [1] . but reading the original source on the study
| [2] it seems like it is not this or any of what we expect.
|
| > 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...
| gus_massa wrote:
| > _from 36 UK schools_
|
| > _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.
| Gooblebrai wrote:
| > 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
|
| 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?
| quacked wrote:
| The only way you can get teenagers to really engage with any
| kind of instruction is to take some of the guardrails off and
| let them interact freely. This means they'll ask
| controversial questions, use slang, curse now and again,
| crack jokes, and go off into tangents that they've been
| thinking about. Adults are allowed to do all this at work,
| but teenagers aren't allowed to do it at school, and virtual
| education makes this even more boring.
|
| 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.
| LoganDark wrote:
| I'm autistic and prefer text for virtually all communication
| because it's easier for me to control a keyboard than it is
| for me to control my voice.
| ndriscoll wrote:
| That sounds neat, but it seems like it's specifically for
| certain (discrete) processes? Like can you use this to e.g.
| derive the shape of atomic orbitals or predict something about
| spectra (which are kind of important parts of quantum
| mechanics)? If not then the implication that it's somehow
| teaching people years of material in 16 hours is about as silly
| as it sounds.
|
| 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.
| whitehexagon wrote:
| It is many years since I visited CERN, but I really enjoyed my
| time there. One of the scientists was wandering around the
| visitor center willing to chat about the science at a quite
| detailed level.
|
| 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.
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