The second CERN Summer Student Webfest has been an amazing event. Physicists, designers, computer scientists and engineers worked together in a 48 hours marathon to create a set of amazing projects involving physics and modern web technologies.
This year, students worked in data visualizations for the most popular scientists at CERN, an antimatter Crowdcrafting.org application, games for teaching and learning physics using different type of games: simulators, puzzles, strategy, etc., reproducible science, and more many more!
The first day, the students pitched several projects and ideas. Most of the students proposed a game based solution for teaching and learning physics, becoming this category the most popular with 8 games! There were other categories:
This year we have introduced a series of tutorials where the students could learn new technologies, techniques, etc. Additionally, we invited them to also propose to give some of the tutorials, making the webfest a very alive event where not only the organizers take part but also the participants suggesting and creating new elements in it.
The tutorials were really interesting:
- Making Website and Media using Mozilla Webmaker and Popcorn Maker, by Michael Kohler (Mozilla).
- Introduction to Crowdcrafting/PYBOSSA, by Daniel Lombraña González (Citizen Cyberscience Centre).
- Facemesh Clone – Web Programming Workshop by S.p. Mohanty a CERN Summer Student.
- Hardware Programming and Arduino by James Devine (CERN).
- Communicating Your Science by Julie Gould (The Movile Collective).
- Masterclass on particle physics – Measuring lifetime of D0 particle by Andrey Ustyuzhanin (CERN).
As in the previous year, the atmosphere was amazing. The students participated in the tutorials (when they were not really busy working on their projects), chat and about everything: code, code, code and work ;-)
On Sunday afternoon, the final pitches about the projects were made and the winner was announced: Mother Hunt. In this game you are an end state particle that explores CERN to try to reconstruct his family history of decay mothers and ancestors.
The team created a 3D world using some of the available models at CERN, making a very interesting and immersing game in the CERN scenario. They created a short story line that could be played in one computer, and they are hoping to release the software, so more people could play it and learn physics.
The other two final chosen projects were:
- Reproducible Science: an IPython module for ROOT that allows any scientist using the ROOT software to share and improve their research on the web.
- Popular Physics in History a web tool that analyzes the most popular scientists at CERN querying back end services like CERN Document Server and INSPIRE High Energy Physics Library.
The event was a success, and we hope that all the students had a lot of fun participating and developing their projects. We will be update this entry with more photos and videos, as soon as they are available.