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.
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.
Over the past 10-20 years, a sequence of quantum optics experiments often referred to as the single-photon experiments have gained popularity in undergraduate labs across the US. We are working on several projects to understand what students learn from working with these experiments in various contexts and what ways of interacting with the experiments lead to students accomplishing various learning goals.
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 are partnering with the local company Infleqtion to design and test educational materials with Albert Quantum Matter Service, a BEC machine on the cloud.
We are also collaborating with Jacob Sherson's group at Aarhus University to explore a new visualization and simulation tool, Quantum Composer, for students learning quantum mechanics. Sherson's group developed Quantum Composer to be used both in educational and research settings and is free to download here.
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.