2025 Annual Report

The SMU Physics Department sponsored the 26th annual QuarkNet Workshop on the SMU
campus in Dallas, Texas. This 3-day workshop was held on July 15-17, 2025, organized by Prof.
Heidi Wu. This year's program included 9 teachers from the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex.
We have also made a new website hosting the resources for the
workshop: https://hywu.github.io/quarknet

The general workshop format was lectures in the morning and hands-on activities and
discussions in the afternoon. We had lectures from SMU faculty members on Cosmology (Prof.
Patrick Breysse), Particle Physics (Profs. Thomas Coan and Tobias Neumann), Special Relativity
(Prof. Fredrick Olness), and Science Education (Prof. Randall Scalise and Mr. Bruce Boehne).
For hands-on activities, we have made cloud chambers in one afternoon, and we had the teachers
rotate through 10 demos designed for high-school classrooms (including Galilean cannon, Tesla
Coil, levitating bulbs, and Sterling engines, designed by Prof. Kuei Sun) on another afternoon.
The teachers took these demos back to their schools.

For the discussion sessions, we had a lively discussion about using Artificial Intelligence (Large
Language Models) in teaching and learning (Prof. Durdana Balakishiyeva). We have also
discussed how to use online teaching resources effectively (Physics Aviary, Pivot Interactives,
etc.).

We took a field trip to UT Southwestern and had a joint session with their STARS (Science
Teacher Access to Resources at Southwestern) program. We heard from Prof. James Collins
about his research in Cell and Molecular Biology. We also had a tour of the Cryo-Electron
Microscopy Facility (CEMF) facilities led by Prof. Daniel Stoddard.

We had a very energetic group of teachers this year, and we look forward to continued interaction
with them in the future.

Submitted by Hao-Yi (Heidi) Wu, SMU QuarkNet Mentor
September, 2025