QuarkNet

This award supports the continuation of QuarkNet, a program which provides valuable research experience to high school teachers, enabling them to teach the basic concepts of introductory physics in a context that students find exciting. QuarkNet has created an ongoing national community of researchers that include high school teachers and students as well as physicists.

QuarkNet's goals are to maintain and enhance this community, to attract young students to careers in science and technology, to help develop scientific literacy in society, and to develop links between the high school classroom and experiments and techniques used to explore the scientific frontier.

Key features of QuarkNet are the establishment of mentor relationships between teachers and scientists, summer research experiences for teachers, and the development of a scientific and learning community within and among centers. QuarkNet provides opportunities for teachers to become more professional, resulting in the development of programming for peers in the center, in their schools and districts and beyond.

QuarkNet provides a centrally hosted, scalable, parallel cyberlearning environment as a cloud-like service. Held at university and laboratory centers, Masterclasses are institutes for teams of students who become physicists for a day, analyzing real experimental data and discussing results in videoconferences with peers and physicists. Under this three-year award, QuarkNet will support more than 50 centers participating in a variety of experiments at CERN, Fermilab and in non-accelerator and astrophysics programs.

In this three-year period, the QuarkNet Program will support: (1) the local programs of the long-term QuarkNet centers for ~400 teachers per year who receive stipends; (2) a few teachers with multi-week summer research appointments to work under the guidance of physicists from a university or laboratory near their homes should new centers join the collaboration; (3) 72 teachers who will attend a one-week particle physics Data Camp at Fermilab to be immersed in an intensive experience to learn more particle physics and one that models an investigation approach to inquiry teaching and learning; (4) 72 teachers will attend a one-week Coding Camp. Coding Camps put authentic experimental data into the hands of teachers and provide the appropriate background, IT tools, training and support that allows them to successfully guide their students in classroom research investigations. (5) 32 fellows with continuing training that gives them the knowledge and skills to offer professional development experiences for other teachers; and (6) 60 teachers who will be involved with masterclasses.

Over the three years (2023-2026) this project is expected to reach, in addition to the teachers, more than 150 physicists, and eventually well over 60,000 students. A portion of this effort is supported through the NSF ATLAS and CMS Operations awards.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.