[ValentinA23]

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2023/dec/16/physicist-bo...

Your educational experiment involved 54 schoolchildren, aged 15-17, who were randomly selected from around 1,000 applicants, from 36 UK schools – mostly state schools. The teenagers spent two hours a week in online classes and after eight weeks were given a test using questions from an Oxford postgraduate quantum physics exam. More than 80% of the pupils passed and around half earned a distinction. Were you surprised by their success?

At one point, I was going to call off the whole thing because I thought it was going to be a complete disaster. We’d originally wanted the kids to interact with each other on social media or communicate online, but that wasn’t allowed due to the ethical guidelines for the experiment. I thought, what sort of educational experience is it, if you can’t talk to each other?

This is the Covid generation: none of them put their cameras on [for the online classes], so we were looking at a black screen. None of them asked questions using their voices, they just typed. It was a difficult teaching challenge by all standards. We also saw a self-esteem problem with the students. But the majority of kids liked that we had announced that you didn’t need a complex maths background. The maths had been a barrier to kids who had wanted to access this knowledge.

And then we got back the numbers. They did significantly better than we see from university-level students. Exams were marked blind, so we don’t know how many came in with the aim of pursuing Stem. We are processing that data now.

[Gooblebrai]

> we were looking at a black screen. None of them asked questions using their voices, they just typed. It was a difficult teaching challenge by all standards

IMO This is one of the most depressing things about teaching teenagers online in real-time. But I don't know what we can do about it. Should we adapt to it? Are there any benefits to enforcing the cameras and voice dialogues?

[quacked]

The only way you can get teenagers to really engage with any kind of instruction is to take some of the guardrails off and let them interact freely. This means they'll ask controversial questions, use slang, curse now and again, crack jokes, and go off into tangents that they've been thinking about. Adults are allowed to do all this at work, but teenagers aren't allowed to do it at school, and virtual education makes this even more boring.

One example: for online teaching, that may require a streaming model where there's a live, mostly uncensored chat where they can keep side conversations going and react to the material. I'm not sure if that model would be of use, but I do know that trying to get teenagers to engage requires the same thing it always has, which is taking them seriously as adults and not censoring them.

[LoganDark]

I'm autistic and prefer text for virtually all communication because it's easier for me to control a keyboard than it is for me to control my voice.

[kitd]

Now I have questions about the Oxford postgraduate quantum physics exam :)

[sesm]

Exactly, how can one pass a postgraduate level exam 'without complex math'?

[tzs]

It didn't say their exam was an entire postgraduate exam. It said they passed an exam consisting of questions from a postgraduate exam.

I'd guess that if someone tried to take the entire exam it would include things that do require "complex math" (whatever that is). But you don't have to get to the parts of QM that require such math in order to cover things that exhibit the meat of QM, such as superposition, entanglement, and uncertainty principles. I'd guess that it was those kinds of things covered for these students and that is what they were tested on.

[elashri]

I have doubt that anyone with a high school maths would even understand any of these (2023 MSc QM level Oxford exam) [1] . but reading the original source on the study [2] it seems like it is not this or any of what we expect.

> This article is concerned with a new language for quantum, to which we refer as quantum picturalism (QPict) [5]. It is the subject of two books written by some of the authors, respectively entitled Picturing Quantum Processes [10] and Quantum in Pictures (QiP) [9]. The first one is the text book of an Oxford University postgraduate course that has been running for well over ten years now. The second one, remarkably, has no mathematical prerequisites beyond what is already taught to 6-7 year olds in the UK, namely angles

[1] https://mmathphys.physics.ox.ac.uk/sitefiles/advanced-quantu...

[2] https://oxford24.github.io/assets/act-papers/49_high_schoole...

[mncharity]

> it is not this or any of what we expect

String diagrams of category theory potentially make working with invariants easier by embedding them in graphical transformations, so they "just maintain themselves". Eg, electric circuit laws.[2] Or here, ZX-calculus/diagrams for QM.[3]

[2] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2106.07763 [3] Medium article: https://medium.com/quantinuum/how-zx-calculus-reveals-the-lo... ; A taste (guest lecture notes): https://arxiv.org/pdf/2303.03163 ; old slides https://www.cs.ox.ac.uk/people/aleks.kissinger/slides/pdf/ak... ; ZX-calculus for the working quantum computer scientist (2020; 90+ pages) https://arxiv.org/pdf/2012.13966

[mncharity]

Quantum Picturalism: Learning Quantum Theory in High School https://arxiv.org/pdf/2312.03653 seems a longer version.

That QPict Quantum picturalism (2009) paper is https://arxiv.org/pdf/0908.1787 .

Picturing quantum processes - A first course in quantum theory and diagrammatic reasoning (2017) is https://www.cs.ox.ac.uk/people/aleks.kissinger/PQP.pdf (900+ pages; only 24 MB). Slides accessible: https://www.cs.ox.ac.uk/ss2014/programme/Bob.pdf ; slides technical: https://www.cs.ox.ac.uk/people/aleks.kissinger/slides/pdf/ak... .

Quantum in Pictures (2022) does not appear to be available open access.

[ValentinA23]

https://x.com/coecke/status/1630551781624238081

    Major milestone for ZX-alike calculi: now for all finite dimensions, with completeness theorem.  I.e. for all dimensions any equation derivable using Hilbert space maths, is derivable with pictures!  ZXW moreover allows for differentiation, integration and exponentiation.

One of the high school student went on publishing a paper applying what he learned during the course, but I can't find it anymore.

[ndriscoll]

A sibling comment posted a 900 page pdf textbook[0] on the subject which mentions the word hydrogen once (discussing the Stern-Gerlach experiment). It doesn't mention atomic spectra at all. It doesn't mention the word "chemistry" at all.

Here's the eigenfunctions and energy levels of the wavefunction for a hydrogen-like atom[1], equations derivable in the Hilbert space formalism which explain the Rydberg formula[2] and offer a path toward understanding molecular bonding. This stuff is usually covered in an introductory quantum mechanics course, which immediately requires you to work with infinite dimensional Hilbert spaces.

The process calculus stuff is neat, but it's not really covering what you might call "quantum physics". The mentioned textbook says it's "about telling the story of quantum theory entirely in terms of pictures", but it doesn't even mention what quantum theory is about. It starts with saying a photon or an electron might be a typical system, but what's a photon and why do we think they exist? What does it mean to say electrons are quantum systems, and why do we think they are?

A standard introductory text like Griffiths (which is also kind of unmotivated but at least covers the material) has e.g. this problem 5.11a: "Figure out electron configuration for the first two rows of the periodic table (up to neon)".

[0] https://www.cs.ox.ac.uk/people/aleks.kissinger/PQP.pdf

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen-like_atom#Non-relativ...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rydberg_formula#For_any_hydrog...

[ndriscoll]

That sounds neat, but it seems like it's specifically for certain (discrete) processes? Like can you use this to e.g. derive the shape of atomic orbitals or predict something about spectra (which are kind of important parts of quantum mechanics)? If not then the implication that it's somehow teaching people years of material in 16 hours is about as silly as it sounds.

The "famously bizarre" parts are the parts that tie it back to the questions that first motivated it, e.g. what is "stuff" made out of, why do molecules behave the way they do, and how to reconcile that with naive predictions you might have from Coulomb's law.

[gus_massa]

> from 36 UK schools

> and after eight weeks were given a test

Was the test remote or in-person? I've seen children (and adults) cheating even for stupid tests that have no grades/prices/whatever.