Together with colleagues from Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München and Technical University of Munich, and based on the work I did with others in the BYOPD/ErUM-FSP T01 ALICE project, we recently released an article about using LEGO and augmented reality in physics education.
The award is mainly given for setting up ‘Build Your Own Particle Detector‘ as an international outreach programme that reaches to an unusually young audience and for the design of particle-detector interlocking-brick models, by now used at over 60 places around the world.
Over the past four months, and together with Christian Klein-Boesing, Marcus Mikorski and a few others, we have been running a workshop for high-school and early-university students to design and build the ALICE Experiment at CERN in LEGO bricks. As part of the weekly meetings we had with the students we also introduced basic concepts of particle, heavy-ion and detector physics.
The workshop series was organised and funded by the ErUM-FSP T01 project “Expansion of ALICE at the LHC: experiments with the ALICE detector at CERN”, which in turn is funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF).
The first models in real-live bricks are foreseen to be build end of June 2021 at Goethe University Frankfurt and University of Münster, with both their ALICE groups taking a leading role in this effort.
Today, my “Teilchenjäger” (particle hunter) profile at Weltmaschine.de went public. Weltmaschine is the public face of the German Large Hadron Collider (LHC) community. Besides the public website, they develop permanent as well as travelling exhibitions, and once in a while also write up pieces about LHC scientists working in Germany ;P