Clara won the Nuclear Zone in March 2014. Here she tells us how she used £500 prize money on further public engagement with science.
If you’d like the chance to win £500 for more science outreach, apply for I’m a Scientist at imascientist.org.uk/scientist-apply
After taking part in the I’m a Scientist event, as I wanted to use it to bring particle physics to schools that aren’t currently able to work with scientists from universities. However, the original plan of doing this through particle physics masterclasses wasn’t able to happen and so, after a fortunate discussion with colleagues at CERN, I was able to stick to the original idea, but support a project designing and building cosmic ray detectors that can be built by schools cheaply!
The prize money has been put towards the CosmiPi project which aims to build the world’s largest open source cosmic ray detector. The original team for the project met thanks to the first hackathon by The Port at CERN in 2014, where people with a mutual interest in building a cosmic ray detector were able to come together and shared skills and enthusiasm. I joined as part of a discussion on how to make the data from the detectors public so that this huge data set could be analysed by anyone around the world.
Specifically, the prize money was put towards developing the next prototype and on materials to spread the message to schools that this is something that they might be interested in. The reach of the project could be huge. Since both the hardware and software are open source, and the aim is to use materials which are as affordable as possible, such as the Raspberry Pi, it means schools around the world can take the design, start building their own and begin measuring cosmic rays coming from the sky and beyond!
It has been recently announced that runners up in the CERN Beam Lines for Schools Competition will receive a CosmiPi to perform physics experiments in their schools.
I think the biggest change for me since I took part in IAS was that this was first time I had done serious science communication online. I had just moved to France (and my French wasn’t very strong at that time), so I couldn’t do my usual outreach method of visiting schools at working at a science festival. After the success of IAS, and seeing how much you can do online, I was motivated to find more ways I could use the internet to communicate the research at CERN. Now I even manage all of the social media for my experiment, ATLAS.
The next step for me would be to expand my outreach work online and also to get more involved with summer schools, especially in place that don’t have a strong connection already to particle physics and hopefully inspire the next generation of physicists.
From taking part in I’m a Scientist, I learnt that it was possible to do good science communication online and I was able to develop my ability to describe complicated scientific concepts in a clear and understandable way.
