Teachers engaged for IPPOG

Introduction

IPPOG Friends is a group of teachers and educators engaged with IPPOG through their interest in educational and outreach activities in particle physics and related sciences. The e-group and Facebook groups are open to join (here will be a link to How to Join IPPOG Friends in the pop-up JOIN US on new IPPOG page). IPPOG Friends are receiving relevant information on outreach activities in particle physics community and are often asked for feedback on different tools developed by IPPOG for its audiences, including physics teachers. This allows IPPOG to ensure that its audiences are co-creating with us and including their opinion makes the tools broadly useful and user-friendly.

History

Since 2017 IPPOG has been offering a project lead to a working group (WG) of CERN high school teachers (HST) programme. The fruitful collaboration of mutual benefits and appreciation turned out to be extremely efficient and valuable exercise. “The WG activity with IPPOG has been a highlight of the HST.”, stated one of the teachers. Group of dedicated teachers from different countries worked several afternoons in 3 weeks on the curation and new categorisation of the IPPOG resource database with over 340 resources. Furthermore, they have proposed a user-friendly structure for the new IPPOG website and valuable suggestions how to communicate with the physics teachers around the world. For instance, they helped to identify national and international physics teachers associations in many countries. At the end of the HST program the WG enthusiastically presented IPPOG to all their colleagues, who have been unaware of IPPOG so far, and engaged the whole group of nearly 50 teachers to become ‘IPPOG Friends’. Since then this e-group and Facebook group includes physics teachers interested to learn about IPPOG activities, take part and disseminate them among their colleagues and students. It grows organically and helps to reach teachers also in countries beyond IPPOG membership. For example thanks to ‘IPPOG Friends’, IPPOG has strong presence in Iran. In 2018 IPPOG was privileged to work with more amazing teachers who continued in steps of their predecessors and in 2019 more coordination has been added to this group thanks to 3 most active teachers, who have been also particularly helpful in ‘Girls, do physics!’ campaign.

Together with CERN HST 2019 participants ‘IPPOG Friends’ e-group counts more than 150 dedicated disseminators of IPPOG knowledge and information around the world and there are more in Facebook group. Any physics teacher and educator can join!