Physics and Physicists

So I don't have any clue on what would be the outcome of such a "marriage". Still, it appears that Rovio, the makers of the wildly-popular Angry Birds (and Angry Pigs) games are teaming up with CERN to come up with some educational games.

Rovio told TechCrunch the collaboration will involve co-producing learning support materials with CERN — including, initially, books and a board game. More products will be added later, the company said. We’ve also reached out to CERN to ask for more details and will update with any response.

“Modern physics has been around for 100 years, but it’s still a mystery to many people. Working together with Rovio, we can teach kids quantum physics by making it fun and easy to understand,” said CERN’s Head of Education, Rolf Landua, speaking at the Frankfurt Book Fair where the Rovio launch took place.

Er... ok. I am certainly curious to see what they come up with. Angry photons smashing into fat, lazy quarks?

Zz.

Seems like the lab is quite popular whenever there is a category on cars. It was on Jeopardy earlier this year, and it is on Jeopardy again this past week.

[フレーム]

Zz.

Some time I wonder where these people come up with such ideas... :)

It appears that there's a game invented out of Hungary that is a card game, but also has a strong educational angle containing elementary particles of the Standard Model.

Linking subatomic particles with New Year’s Eve celebrations may not be so strange: Two years ago, a group of Hungarian secondary school students rang in the New Year while playing with particles, literally. The group, which included Judit Csörgő, daughter of RHIC/PHENIX collaborator Tamás Csörgő, and her friend Csaba Török, were at a New Year’s celebration, playing with the first edition of a set of cards invented by Csaba as an entertaining way to learn about subatomic particles and their interactions. The game, more formally developed and tested by the students with mentoring help from Tamás, won an honorable mention in a 2010 Hungarian competition for junior innovators. It is now available for purchase as an e-book, with cards included, on Lulu, currently with Hungarian directions. An English version is in the works.

Supposedly there is a version of the game called "Quark Matter".

“My favorite,” said Tamás, “is Quark Matter,” the game most closely related to RHIC physics. In it, the cards are mixed face up on a table, packed closely together to represent matter at the instant of a collision at RHIC—a quark-gluon plasma. The object for each of the players is to quickly extract particles as they would emerge from a RHIC collision: non-interacting neutrinos and antineutrinos first, followed by electron/positron and muon/anti-muon pairs, and then finally the quarks and anti-quarks as they hadronize, or freeze out, to form mesons (made of a quark and an anti-quark) , baryons (three quarks) and anti-baryons (three anti-quarks), all the while maintaining a neutral color charge (by joining red, green, and blue quarks, for instance, or red/anti-red pairs).

As players race one another to extract the correct particles, the “system” expands—as particle cards are pushed apart—just as it does in a real RHIC collision. Players score points for each correct particle pick.

“At the beginner level, students are usually quicker and more successful players, than physicists are,” Csaba added.

Hum... How do non-scientists would know which card to pull out? I mean, you have to first of all know that neutrinos don't interact and would be the first one to get pulled out before, say, electrons and muons. I'm not sure how a 6-year old, for example, would be able to know this and play the game.

Oh well. I suppose I have to either see this for myself, or play it, to verify its "addictiveness".

Edit: this webpage gives you info on how to order the card game.

Zz.