Online Masterclass built on the KASCADE Cosmic ray Data Centre

Abstract

During the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic, people all over the world were forced to think about new ways of interacting with each other and this has especially challenged academics in their outreach activities with pupils. New online formats needed to be developed, and we used this opportunity to design and implement an (not only) online Masterclass using data from the KASCADE experiment. The masterclass is built on the KASCADE Cosmic Ray Data Centre and uses Jupyterhub and Notebooks for data analysis. We gained first practical experience during the International Cosmic Day with students at the age of 14-19 years. The Masterclass includes lectures on cosmic ray physics and data analysis, which are then consolidated in a hands-on part. By performing a cosmic-ray composition analysis on KASCADE data, the participants gain experience in using the KCDC open data web platform, working in the Jupyter environment, preprocessing data from a real astroparticle physics experiment, programming Python and performing exploratory data analysis.

KCDC -- the KASCADE Cosmic-ray Data Centre

“…The Jupyter environment serves as a versatile tool, facilitating not only individual work but also conduction of tutorials and masterclasses. Our first experience of organising a fully online master class (due to the prevailing Corona conditions) based on KCDC data using the Jupyter instance at KIT/IAP, was presented in [6].…”

Using Modern Machine Learning Methods on KASCADE Data for Outreach and Education

“…Intensive scientific communication is becoming a popular trend, supported by such large collaborations as IceCube, Auger [7,8], KASCADE [9], KARTIN [10], KM3NeT [11], etc., as well as by large scientific institutions such as DESY [12](Germany), and the National Institute for Nuclear Physics [13] (INFN, Italy).…”

Status and Future Prospects of the KASCADE Cosmic-ray Data Centre KCDC

“…Materials from the KCDC portal were used while carrying out events like the International Cosmic Day (ICD) 2018 [8] and 2020 [9], as well as for preparing lectures and training materials as part of the collaborative work with colleagues from GRADLC (https://gradlc-dc.iap. kit.edu), which was reflected in some materials on the astroparticle.online portal (https:// astroparticle.online/) [10].…”