Grad students put the fun in physics with new outreach event for teens

Physics has a problem and graduate students Simaya Rosenbloom and Monika Azmanska have a solution.

Just 12 per cent of students in Canada complete Grade 12 physics. Doing outreach to drive up enrolment could help but there’s another problem that Monika and Simaya have seen firsthand.

Monika’s completing her PhD, Simaya’s earning her master’s degree and they’re both coordinators with McMaster’s chapter of Let’s Talk Science – a national non-profit focused on education and skills development for children and youth in Canada through science, technology, engineering and math based programs.

Physics gets short shrift when it comes to talks, demos and experiments in elementary and secondary schools, say Monika and Simaya. Biology, chemistry and environmental science tend to steal the show.  

“Physics gets a bit of a bad rap,” says Simaya. “Many people think it’s too hard or too complicated. Physics is actually very elegant, fun and something to get excited about. Most people don’t realize that physics is all around them.” 

So Monika and Simaya started kicking around ideas for an outreach event that would be 100 per cent physics with a heavy emphasis on fun. For inspiration, they looked to ELEVATE: A Day for Inclusion in Science. Organized by Promoting Inclusion in Physics & Astronomy, the day-long annual event for Grade 10 students pulls in departments and schools from across the Faculty of Science to deliver lectures and workshops. Physics is part of the day but not the whole show.

Jody Bruulsema, an instructional assistant in the Physics & Astronomy department who helps run ELEVATE, agreed to lend a hand.

The trio set out to create an on-campus outreach event for Grade 11 and 12 students that would steer clear of lectures on the principles of physics. “We wanted to keep it playful so students could explore wonderful physics principles in a tangible and relatable way,” says Simaya.

A playful event needed a playful name and Simaya came up with Physics BOOM – short for “by order of magnitude”.  

Students would spend their day moving between a half-dozen interactive stations, each showcasing physics at a different length scale – from the size of an atomic nucleus up to the light year.

The stations would be staffed by McMaster graduate and undergraduate physics students. “We wanted high school students to see that physicists are real people. While we’re very knowledgeable, we’re also very approachable,” says Simaya.  

Invitations went out for the free event and local schools jumped at the offer, sending 150 students to the inaugural Physics BOOM at the end of April. Monika and her station co-presenter knew they’d hit the mark when their talk and demo on quantum condensed matter got a round of applause from a room full of teens who’d arrived that morning knowing little about physics.

The other stations were a hit with a crowd that can be tough to engage and impress. Simaya’s since shared the made-at-Mac concept with the national Let’s Talk Science team in hopes of making it an annual Canada-wide event run by universities across the country.

Simaya says she intentionally designed Physics BOOM to be scalable for larger or smaller audiences. 

Regardless of audience size, the grad students say it’s an event that gives physics and physicists an overdue star turn when it comes to outreach and could inspire more than just 12 per cent of students to study the elegant subject in high school.