We are working on several quantum education projects looking at various ways to teach students the knowledge and skills needed to work with quantum experiments in various contexts.
Here at CU Boulder, there is a new senior capstone course where students partner with a company in the quantum industry for a year-long authentic project. We are investigating how students’ perceptions about, and interest in, the quantum industry change throughout this year-long course. We also plan to investigate student perceptions about this course overall and the effect it has had on them as they transitioned into the workforce.
Since the early 2000s, a sequence of quantum optics experiments often referred to as the single-photon experiments have gained popularity in undergraduate labs across the US. We have performed several studies to better understand how these experiments are currently used in undergraduate courses, how students think about the idea of “seeing" quantum mechanics and whether they attain related learning goals, and what conceptual resources students use while working with the single-photon interferometer experiment.
At the graduate level, we are also working on a project in a first year PhD quantum laboratory course at the University of Bristol to better understand student perceptions of experimental and theoretical physics and connections between them, especially with relation to quantum technologies.
Students seem to obtain benefits from working with quantum experiments, but not all institutions have the resources to provide their students this opportunity. To begin investigating ways to make quantum experiments available to all students, we have partnered with the local company Infleqtion to design and test educational materials with Oqtant, a BEC machine on the cloud. The activities we developed (two Jupyter notebooks with corresponding preparation activities) can be found here. For questions about the materials or to obtain instructor guides, please contact us at lewandoh@colorado.edu. Note that Oqtant is on an indefinite pause beginning November 2024.
The Physics Frontiers Centers (PFC) program supports university-based centers and institutes where the collective efforts of a larger group of individuals can enable transformational advances in the most promising research areas. The program is designed to foster major breakthroughs at the intellectual frontiers of physics by providing needed resources such as combinations of talents, skills, disciplines, and/or specialized infrastructure, not usually available to individual investigators or small groups, in an environment in which the collective efforts of the larger group can be shown to be seminal to promoting significant progress in the science and the education of students. PFCs also include creative, substantive activities aimed at enhancing education, broadening participation of traditionally underrepresented groups, and outreach to the scientific community and general public.