Making particle physics and cosmology accessible for high school students

In teaching science, you often need to decide on how far to introduce students to topics from an abstract scientific and mathematical perspective. Considering this question, we developed and tested educational materials on Particle Physics and Cosmology for students of grade 9 to 12 at secondary and upper secondary level, and for gifted students in special courses or academies, like Deutsche Schülerakademie or competitions like Jugend forscht, building on their prior knowledge. Our material also contains experiments supported by DESY and the University ofWuppertal. The theoretical parts of our course material cover electromagnetism and quantum mechanics up to Maxwell’s equations, the Schrödinger equation and the Klein-Gordon equation, which require basic knowledge in differential equations and group theory. Some course participants were introduced to geometrical path lengths, tensors, and symmetries (according to Ellwange, 2012; Wong, 2013). The evaluation of the results, the material, and the courses from a cognitive as well as a psychological point of view unfolds possibilities and necessities to elaborate on different parts of exercises and projects on different levels, and revealed new relations between these parts. Students’ perception of physics and mathematics, their beliefs in understanding something and their workout of projects indicated relationships different from our expectations ([10], [11]). Results in connection with different types of courses are described below for experiments on (i) Differential Equations, (ii) Path Length and (iii) Symmetries. The topics are described in connection with courses, activities, or students’ projects.