CERN Beamline for Schools 2018 winners (Right) Team from the International School of Manila, Philippines.
(Left) Some of the winners from R.N. Podar School in Mumbai, India.
High school students from the International School of Manila, Philippines, and R.N. Podar School in Mumbai, India, are the winners of the Beamline for Schools Competition 2018. In September, the winning teams will carry out their proposed experiments at CERN with the help of professional scientists.
On its 5th year the Competition, open to high-school students from all over the world, saw 195 teams taking part, rising from 180 teams in 2017.
Taking into consideration creativity, motivation, feasibility and scientific method, CERN experts had a hard time choosing the two winners: “Beamcats” from Philippines and “Cryptic Ontics” from India. All of the thirty shortlisted teams were exceptionally good, and came close to winning. They will receive as a prize for their effort a detector of cosmic rays, the Cosmic-Pi, to run physics experiments in the classroom.
For the first time two Asian high schools have won the competition. Previously, students from the Netherlands, Greece, Italy, South Africa, Poland, United Kingdom, and Canada were selected to perform their proposed experiments at CERN. Recently, the data collected by the 2016 Beamline for Schools winning team Liceum Ogólnokształcące im. Marsz. St. Małachowskiego, Poland, were published in IOP science, and the paper of the second winning team from 2016 was formally accepted for publication in the same journal.
Beamline for Schools is an education and outreach project funded by the CERN & Society Foundation, supported by individual donors, foundations and companies. In 2018, the project is funded in part by the Arconic Foundation; additional contributions are received from the Motorola Solutions Foundation, Amgen, as well as from the Ernest Solvay Fund, managed by the King Baudouin Foundation.
The 2019 edition of Beamline for Schools will take place at the research centre DESY in Hamburg, Germany. CERN’s accelerators will enter a two-year maintenance and upgrade break at the end of this year, which means that there will be no beams to serve the beamlines. CERN is happy to announce that it has teamed up with DESY, one of the world’s leading accelerator centres and Germany's national laboratory for particle physics, accelerators and photon science, to continue the Beamline for Schools project during the upgrade break.