Thesis poster talks aimed at high-school students

Why?

One facet of outreach is the "quick and dirty explanation"; the answer to "What do you do?" and "You just got a PhD? What's your thesis?"

Explaining that in 15 seconds on an elevator is a bit challenging--there's a lot of background to explain, and you can't just assume people know that charged particles don't move in a straight line when magnetic fields are about.

Suppose each grad student writes a thesis and a "poster-session" explanation of it, with the target audience being high-school students who've had only some physical science. These we make available through department and experiment web pages, and as part of the material brought along on outreach events.

  1. The student gets some training in explaining things to non-specialists.
  2. A curious high-school student might think "I can do this too" and consider taking physics (best to start learning at least in high school).
  3. A very bright younger student might think the same (the earlier they start the better)
  4. Bottom line--we're hired to "explore, see what's over the next hill, and report back"--we need to make sure people easily understand us.

There's a lot of background material that needs to be available. This kind of project is more suited to web pages with plenty of links, than it is to a video talk. The readers can follow links to whatever explanations they need as they please. (What's angular momentum? What's momentum?) The background material the Department can supply, maybe piggy-backing on existing material other universities have compiled. A “poster-talk” style description of a research project aimed at high-school level students and the general public requires some resources.

Supporting material:

We need a body of elementary explanations for the concepts involved in the research. Some of these will be very elementary.

When I first floated this notion I found that several universities had already created collections of web pages explaining vectors, momentum, and so on. Some concepts were illustrated with animations. At the time many were incomplete. I assume that the body of illustrative work is much larger and clearer now. It takes a lot of effort to do these.

We need elementary mechanics, E/M, vectors, trig, elementary thermodynamics, simplified quantum mechanics, statistics, and so on. A lot of this exists already but has to be coordinated. Look and feel customization is low priority.

Some of the research concepts will be more advanced, and specific to neutrino physics and astrophysics in general. We would probably have to create those ourselves. We’ve done some work already, but we’d need more, and need to integrate this into the framework of more basic explanations.

In particular, some concepts are best described visually to a non-expert, and in my hands it took a lot of time to create useful graphics.

Supporting people:

Quite a few professors I’ve known have been good—some very good—at explaining things at an elementary level. It is harder than it looks. Ideally the student’s advisor would be the first to explain how to break down the thesis into simpler bits.

We also need someone familiar with the supporting material to help the student. This person needs to be very good at explaining concepts simply, and patient.

Implementation:

Proof of principle:

  1. Select a paper that we think could be made generally interesting. Solicit volunteers to work on the project.
  2. One set of volunteers searches for web pages explaining the elementary concepts for the supporting material.
  3. A second set of volunteers rewrites the paper into short and simplified chunks, flagging concepts that demand illustration. There will be a lot of these.
  4. Probably we will need some high-level concept illustration. That will translate into some designer time.
  5. The surviving volunteers create the final set of pages. I can testify that putting in all the links can be tedious.
We set up the result on a web server and ask some friends’ children to have a look at it. We might ask a friendly high school teacher to help.

Iterate a time or two to incorporate their feedback.

The initial project may want some eye-catching display. This takes designer time.

We link to this from qr-codes in our outreach materials, posters, and so on.

Next step:

If we are satisfied with the result, we can ask for consensus that students should be asked to do this with their theses. At that time we will be able to better estimate how expensive the operation will be.

The cost of collecting and preparing the supporting material is mostly front-loaded. Creating thesis-specific material and providing advising support are ongoing costs. Perhaps we could create materials for a mini-course in “writing for the public.”

Complications:

The student is highly motivated to get the degree and get out as quickly as possible. All the poster-talk work should happen before they present their thesis. Otherwise it won’t happen.

Some professors are absent/not good at simplifying/eager to get the student out the door. These students will need some help from someone else. Who?

Unless this is across-the-board policy, most students will plead for an exception.

For the Proof-of-principle study, we need a lot of volunteers, because everybody is busy.

It is hard to evaluate the effectiveness of this project. Intuitively it seems useful, but if it inspires students we won’t know for years.