Work

GW Explorer: A Beginner's Guide -- Developing a Computational Gravitational-Wave Outreach Curriculum for High School Students

Year: 2026

Type: preprint

Abstract: We present GW Explorer: A Beginner's Guide, an outreach curriculum designed to introduce high school students to gravitational-wave (GW) astrophysics through interactive Python Jupyter notebooks. Most existing GW resources target beginning audiences and advanced students, leaving a gap at the pre-college level that we directly address. The curriculum integrates foundational physics with hands-on computation implemented through both self-directed and workshop-based instructional formats. In the self-directed format, students completed the curriculum independently on cloud-based platforms such as Google Colab. During the workshop format, students worked through the same activities under the guidance of University of Nevada, Las Vegas graduate student mentors. Topics span gravity, spacetime, GW sources, interferometric detection, and data analysis. An implementation in local high school classrooms informed the content and pacing, and survey results demonstrate gains in conceptual understanding and coding confidence. GW Explorer offers a scalable, open-access framework for authentic astrophysics research in the high school classroom.

Source: arXiv (Cornell University)

DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2609.10717

Authors: Langgin, Rachel, Tejeda, Bradlee, Haster, Carl-Johan

Institutions: University of Nevada, Las Vegas, Vanderbilt University

Language: English

Topic: Science Education and Pedagogy

Subfield: Education

Field: Social Sciences

Domain: Social Sciences

SDG: Quality education

Open Access status: green