As part of its mission to promote professional development among America's high school science educators, QuarkNet routinely provides educational materials to high school science teachers designed to enhance their lesson plans with guided inquiries into real scientific experiments and research projects.  Working with the Parsl group, we prepared a set of interactive, web-based notebooks that guide students through the analysis of cosmic ray muon data collected by QuarkNet's network of researchers and educators.  These notebooks combine important lessons on the physics of cosmic rays with insight into the computational methods and tools used to draw sound, data-based conclusions from their study.

Intellectual Merits

Contemporary scientific research is inseparable from advanced computation and data analysis, making it increasingly vital for high school science educators to be able to form connections between the important scientific concepts they teach and the data analysis skillsets needed to apply them in real-world contexts.  Without these connections, students may find themselves underprepared for careers in scientific inquiry and for civic participation in science-based public policy discussions.

QuarkNet helped create and currently maintains a set of webapps called e-Labs that take real data from contemporary scientific experiments and present it in a form tailored for guided analysis in the high school classroom.  These e-Labs focus solely on science learning goals, and they lack any components dedicated to programming or data science education.  Parsl, a Python library for parallelizing scientific code and managing data analysis workflows, allows us to introduce just such a component in a format amenable to illuminating basic principles of scientific programming and data science that are appropriate to the high school science curriculum.

Over the lifetime of the partnership between QuarkNet and Parsl, we expanded one of the cosmic-ray-based data analyses of the QuarkNet e-Labs into a set of Jupyter Notebooks that retain the e-Labs' lessons on the physics of cosmic rays while providing additional insight into the data analysis code and data manipulation techniques employed by it.  The notebooks further demonstrate to students how these tools and techniques are generalized by researchers studying real physics data.

In creating the notebooks, we collaborated with teachers and a mentor within QuarkNet's network of educators in order to ensure that the Notebooks address high-school level learning goals.  We tested their use with a group of high school students performing summer research at the Notre Dame QuarkNet center.  The results of these efforts indicate that the Notebooks are appropriate for use with high-school level activities such as special classroom projects, honors projects for AP Physics and Computer Science students, and extracurricular workshops and clubs.

Broader Impacts

Scientific programming and data science are areas of education that are frequently underserved in the high school classroom despite the long-recognized importance of these skillsets in the modern technological workforce.  Integrating such computation-oriented skills into an existing STEM curriculum without negatively affecting students' more fundamental science education, however, is a non-trivial challenge.

The Parsl-based cosmic ray data notebooks described here represent an ideal method for delivering a high-school level introduction to programming and data science in a manner that enhances, rather that distracts from, teachers' existing science-based lesson plans.  The Jupyter Notebook platform makes these notebooks accessible via web browser to any classroom, with only minimal existing knowledge required of instructors and students.  Thus, these notebooks and any future work that follows their model will be able to provide accessible instruction in important computational skills by integrating authentic research data and state-of-the-art programming tools into high school STEM education.

Last Modified: 11/16/2019
Modified by: Mitchell R Wayne