Elisa Gatz, NIU Center, Illinois

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QuarkNet has made a huge difference in my classroom. High energy physics was not really taught during my undergrad studies, and so I was left trying to teach myself from my textbooks while I was teaching. I could memorize the standard model, but I didn’t really understand it and it showed. Once I got involved in QuarkNet, it changed the way I learned it and how I teach it. Through research with my mentor, workshops with my students, activities through the QuarkNet program, and visiting high energy research facilities, it has come alive. My students don’t memorize the standard model, they use a Cosmic Ray Muon Detector to measure properties of particles and they visit particle physics research labs like Fermilab. They see actual results of research and make measurements through Masterclass. I can continue learning through Boot Camp (which I have done three times and would do again), and I have spent 3 weeks at CERN for their HST program. QuarkNet not only gives me opportunities and resources for learning particle physics, there are other valuable lessons that I get to pass along to students. Students learn histograms, atomic structure, how research is done, energy, momentum, and magnetism. In 31 years of teaching, I have not found another program that gives such learning opportunities and resources for teachers, and it is especially helpful in that not all of us had any training in high energy physics before beginning teaching. Elisa Gatz Sterling High School Sterling, Il Northern Illinois University Center .

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Darwin Smith, Virtual Center, Illinois
I have been involved with the QuarkNet Virtual Center for 8 or 9 years. In that time I have had students display Cosmic Ray research at the Illinois Junior Science and Humanities Symposium and science fairs, through the Masterclass work with data from the Large Hadron Collider, and participate in video conferences with students from Mexico, China, New Zealand, the Philippines, and Japan. A QuarkNet mentor did a video conference with Hispanic students at a school where I formerly worked. My involvement with QuarkNet has provided me with content knowledge I would otherwise not have had, and as a non-physics major I probably would have considered it out of my reach. Thanks to my involvement in QuarkNet I learned of the summer program for teachers at CERN. After participating in that two summers ago, I now have physics teacher friends in more than 30 other countries, and many of us maintain contact through our CERN HST2016 Facebook page. I have also taken six classes of physics students to the Fermilab Open House where they conducted hands-on activities for younger children, followed by tours of Fermilab and Argonne Lab the next day. I would probably not have been invited to be part of that had it not been for my QuarkNet involvement. But because I am a part of QuarkNet, my students are exposed to world-class research facilities as well as feeling they are a part of something far beyond their small town and small science classroom. The photo is from last year's Masterclass; I think the other students were in China and the Philippines, and a third location had temporarily lost the connection.
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