Education, outreach & citizen science

Open Data for Education

The LHC experiments have released more than 5 Petabytes of Open Data via CERN’s Open Data Portal. If you are not (yet) a researcher but want to play around with the data to learn or teach, there are several resources available.

The ATLAS collaboration has its own portal designed to get you started with exploring their data. If you want to dig deeper, the ATLAS Open Data Team has organised a tutorial on how to use its Open Data. On the website of this event, you find presentations covering various topics including hands-on tutorials. 

The CMS collaboration has published a guide to how to get started playing around with their data. If you are already more advanced, they also have a guide for how to get started with using them for research. In their last Open Data Workshop, you find some useful resources.

LHCb and ALICE also publish Open Data. If you want to find out more about how to use them, please refer to this page. They have, like ATLAS and CMS, developed Masterclasses which use their data. See below for further information.

In the wider context of the high energy physics (HEP) community, the International Particle Physics Outreach Group (IPPOG) provides the following resources which make use of Open Data, not only from the LHC experiments, but also other particle physics experiments and even other hands on open data projects such as on Cosmic Rays from the Pierre Auger observatory.:

Another way to engage with Open Data would be International Masterclasses. These are local events organized by institutions all over the world where you get hands-on experience in working with data from the LHC experiments.

Open Educational Resources

CERN’s education team has compiled a database containing all kinds of educational resources which can be used to learn about physics.

The wider HEP community collects outreach resources through the International Particle Physics Outreach Group (IPPOG) with a dedicated section on Open Science Projects.