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Exploring ATLAS with Minecraft
Abingdon School students joined a small group of UK teenagers to create an interactive museum of one of the world’s most famous science experiments – the ATLAS detector at the Large Hadron Collider – in the virtual land of Minecraft.
ATLAScraft was a collaborative project to construct the virtual model with pupils from three Oxfordshire schools, Abingdon School, Didcot Girls' School and Fitzharrys School together with students from Portsmouth Grammar School. The teenagers worked with scientists from Oxford University, Birmingham University and CERN to develop ideas that could be used to visualise and explain what happens inside the ATLAS detector, where the famous Higgs Boson was discovered. ATLAScraft has now gone live so that anyone with access to the Minecraft computer game can explore it.
The schools involved were co-ordinated by the Abingdon Science Partnership. Four 4th year pupils from Abingdon School took part: Charlie Franklin, Freddie Nicholson, William Bywater and Tristan Mann-Powter with sixth former Joe O'Shea, acting as team mentor.
Commenting on the project Joe said, “I was really impressed how the boys could use Minecraft to demonstrate really complex particle physics processes and models so elegantly”.
Particle physicists at Oxford, Birmingham and CERN will also be using ATLAScraft in their own outreach activities to explain particle physics to schoolchildren. The whole project was supported financially by the UK's Science and Technology Facilities Council to highlight the important role that UK based scientists play in such inspirational, international projects. The project was also supported by the Institute for Research in Schools.