School students visit the SciPhyLab in Aachen
On the 5th of March, students pursuing the 13th grade advanced physics class in a local school in Aachen spent a whole day hopping between labs at RWTH Aachen where they had the opportunity to perform hands-on university-level experiments through the SciPhyLab program.
The one-day program is carried out by a physics didactics group at RWTH Aachen led by Prof. Heidrun Heinke using the ML4Q Educational Package. The program is directed towards students preparing to take the high school qualifying exams “Abitur”, and is highly appreciated by the students and their teachers.
The SciPhyLab is a physics school lab and is aimed at complementing the high school physics curriculum in North Rhine-Westphalia by offering in-depth hands-on experience in quantum physics using experiments on 1-D potential wells, wave-particle duality and entanglement. The Educational Package was provided by the Cluster in 2021 and was established in Aachen with the help of the Physikwerkstatt Rheinland at the Bonn cluster site. Since then several Bachelor students of the physics didactics group devoted their theses to developing the school experiments and handouts. These experiments are usually quite technical and inaccessible at high school facilities; hence such a program does not only give the students a taste of a career in physics but also guides them towards a better understanding of the physics they are studying.
School labs are accessible at all cluster sites, with well-established structures and different philosophies. Along with ZDI Schülerlabore (SciPhyLab) in Aachen, other sites offer similar experiences for local students: Bonn (Physikwerkstatt Rheinland) and Cologne (ZDI Schülerlabor) as well as the Julab at Forschungszentrum Jülich.
The ML4Q Educational Package is an outreach activity that addresses students and teachers, promoting quantum physics as an attractive field of study. The students’ need for a beyond-school experience (außerschulische Lernorte) and the teachers’ need for beyond-school equipment are both met by the scientific and didactical expertise available within the cluster sites.
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(image credits: Sebastian Nell)
