Making ATLAS Data from CERN Accessible to the General Public: The Development and Evaluation of a Learning Resource in Experimental Particle Physics

In 2016, the ATLAS experiment at CERN released data from 100 trillion proton-proton collisions to the general public. In connection to this release the ATLAS Outreach group has developed several tools for visualizing and analyzing the data, one of which is a Histogram analyzer. The focus of this project is to bridge the gap between the general public's knowledge in physics and what is needed to use this Histogram analyzer. The project consists of both the development and an evaluation of a learning resource that explains experimental particle physics for a general public audience. The learning resource is a website making use of analogies and two perspectives on learning: Variation Theory and Cognitive Load Theory. The evaluation of the website was done using a survey with 10 respondents and it focused on whether analogies and the perspectives on learning helped their understanding. In general the respondents found the analogies to be helpful for their learning, and to some degree they found the explanations based on Variation Theory to be helpful. The implementations of Cognitive Load Theory were considered to be helpful by the respondents who noticed them, but the majority did not, implying that improvements of the design are needed. The results indicate that analogies and the two perspectives on learning can be helpful for explaining experimental particle physics, but there might be other learning theories more suitable for this purpose.