The Development and Assessment of Particle Physics Summer Program for High School Students

A four week immersive summer program for high school students was developed and implemented to promote awareness of university level research. The program was completely directed by an undergraduate physics major and included a hands-on and student-led capstone project for the high school students. The goal was to create an adaptive and shareable curriculum in order to influence high school students' views of university level research and what it means to be a scientist. The program was assessed through various methods including a pre and post survey developed for the program, a previously vetted student attitudes toward STEM survey, weekly blog posts, and an oral exit interview. The curriculum included visits to local laboratories, an introduction to particle physics and the IceCube collaboration, an introduction to electronics and computer programming, and their capstone project: planning and building a scale model of the IceCube detector. At the conclusion of the program the high school students participated an outreach event to the general public at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia and gave a formal oral presentation to the Department of Physics at Drexel University. More details concerning the curriculum and its development along with the results will be shared.