Fully Funded Beamline for Schools Competition 2019 is being organized in Hamburg.

Beamline for Schools (BL4S) is a competition that offers highschool students the chance to conduct a real experiment at a real research laboratory. Also, it has become a very popular science competition motivating almost 10,000 students to learn about particle physics. This year CERN is collaborating with DESY in Hamburg, Germany. DESY is a world-leading accelerator centre and Germany’s national laboratory for particle physics, accelerators and photon science. It offers particle beams and infrastructure that allow for a very wide range of experiments in particle physics, detector development, as well as multidisciplinary science.

The competition is open to teams of high-school students. If they win, they get invitations (with up to two supervisors) to DESY to run their experiment. Teams must have at least five students having age 16 and with at least one adult supervisor or “coach”. But, there is no upper limit to a team’s size (although just nine students per winning team get invitations to DESY). Teams may be composed of pupils from a single school, or a number of schools working together. Think of a simple, creative experiment and submit your written proposal and short video by 31 March 2019.

Rewards

The two winning teams will win a trip of 10-12 days to DESY, to carry out their proposed experiments at a beam line. BL4S will cover the full costs of the winners’ participation to the competition, including travel, local transport, accommodation in the DESY hostel and three meals per day. Before coming to DESY, the winning teams will have the opportunity to work together with scientists on their ideas on how to use the beam line and plan out a particle physics experiment.

Beside the two winning teams, up to 30 teams will be in shortlist. These teams will receive a CosmicPi particle detector for their school and a T-shirt for each team member.

Furthermore, all participants will receive a BL4S certificate to certify their submission of proposals.