Project leader: Kati Lassila-Perini    Personnel

Education and open data project covers two domains:

  • Finnish high-school and teacher visits at CERN
  • Data preservation and open access of the CMS experiment.

Close interconnection of these two activities results in fruitful collaboration promoting the use of open data in education and offers highly interesting thesis subjects at Bachelor, Master and doctoral level.

The Finnish high-school visit programme has been very successful: more than 7500 high-school students and teachers have attended a three-day visit at CERN since the beginning of this activity in 2000. Each year, 18 groups of high-school students visit CERN as a part of their science studies. A separate five-day course is organized for teachers in June.

More information for schools is available in page CERN-tiedeleirit.

The Data preservation and open access project in the CMS experiment started in 2012. The project has defined the principles of long-term preservation and reusability of the scientific data in CMS, and delivered ten open data releases between 2014 and 2024, through CERN Open Data portal. These releases have delivered to public domain all proton-proton collision data taken in CMS during 2010-2012, and 50% of those taken in 2015-2016. The latest release was in April 2020, and the preparations of next releases are under way. This is the leading project in the particle physics in this domain. The preparations of next releases are under way. These data are widely used in research and the HIP group contributes to ensuring their best possible long-term usability.

The public data opens a wide variety of yet mostly unexploited possibilities for their use in education. The large and complex scientific datasets can be further simplified for use in teaching of basic physics, statistical methods and data handling in general. With  the combined expertise on education and scientific data, this project is developing tools for an introduction to the concept of big data at school. Training courses have been organized for teachers in Finland on the use of open data in education in 2017 (Hiukkasfysiikan avoin data opetuksessa, Viikki), in 2018 (Jyväskylä), in 2019 (Avoin data opetuskäytössä – tuulahdus huippututkimusta kouluun, Rovaniemi), and in 2021 as remote training (Avoin data opetuskäytössä – tuulahdus huippututkimusta kouluun). Instructions and example material for teachers are available in Open data in education guide pages.