Darwin Smith, Virtual Center, Illinois

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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. Darwin Smith Quincy Notre Dame High School Quincy IL Virtual Center .

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