Burt Holzman is one of 14 Fermilab employees who visited local schools for Hour of Code in December. Holzman visited second- through fifth-grade classrooms at Wolf’s Crossing Elementary School in Aurora. Photo: Stephanie Comes
With information technology integrated into so many aspects of our lives, having some computer science skills will be essential for the future workforce. However, less than half of all schools teach computer science. Furthermore, while 71 percent of STEM jobs are currently in computer science, only 8 percent of STEM graduates study computer science. These gaps are concerning, but there are efforts under way to close them.
Hour of Code is a worldwide movement designed to demystify code, to show that anybody can learn the basics and to broaden participation in computer science and other technical fields. Over 400 partners and 200,000 educators globally currently support the movement.
As part of Computer Science Education Week on Dec. 4-10, Fermilab partnered with Argonne National Laboratory on an initiative to bring Hour of Code activities and coding role models to local schools. Fourteen employees from Fermilab, along with several from various Argonne organizations, visited area elementary, middle and high schools and spoke about their labs, their careers and coding in general. They also assisted students with coding exercises.
This is the second year Penelope Constanta, application developer and system analyst, participated in Hour of Code. Over the course of one day, Constanta visited 13 classrooms at Oswego’s Fox Chase Elementary School, from first grade to fifth grade, with varying levels of coding experience. She explained to the children who had never coded what a computing program is, and for those who had, she helped with the coding tasks that they were asked to do.
“I did love the kids’ reactions when I asked them to ‘program me’ to move to a location in the classroom or do some simple task,” Constanta said. “At all levels, they were able to grasp the simple concepts that I introduced.” For all but two of the classes she attended, this was the first time these kids had heard about programming.
Scientist Adam Lyon spent a morning at Thomas Jefferson Junior High School in Woodridge.
“It was a lot of fun, and the teachers and kids were great,” he said. “The Minecraft and Flappy Bird projects were by far the most popular, though several kids told me that Minecraft is so 2015.”
Application developer and system analyst Kris Brandt attended both introductory and AP computer science classes at St. Charles East High School, where the students are already coding, so she didn’t need to introduce the concept of coding.
“Instead, my talk focused on scientific versus core computing at Fermilab and computing careers in general,” Brandt said. “They were also curious and impressed by some of the stats from ‘Computing by the Numbers,’ especially the amount of data we manage and the cybersecurity stats. Quantum computing was also a hot topic. They were a very curious and smart group of kids, which made the experience fun.”
Fermilab Chief Information Officer Rob Roser highlighted Fermilab Computing’s positive impact in the community.
“I am very proud of the enthusiastic participation from all branches of Computing in this important outreach event,” Roser said. “Reaching out through the schools and showing these kids that coding is both fun and accessible to them and that the end result can change the world is very powerful.”
The Fermilab participants and the schools they visited were:
Kris Brandt: St. Charles East High School
Penelope Constanta: Fox Chase Elementary School, Oswego
Lynn Garren: Churchill Elementary School, Oswego
Ken Herner: Lemont High School
Burt Holzman: Wolf’s Crossing Elementary, Aurora
Tanya Levshina: Morrill Math & Science Elementary School, Chicago
Adam Lyon: Thomas Jefferson Junior High School
Marco Mambelli: UIC College Prep, Chicago
Craig Mohler: Timber Ridge Middle School, Plainfield
Keenan Newton: Thornton Fractional South High School, Lansing
Irene Shiu: Boulder Hill Elementary, Oswego
Margaret Votava: Bower Elementary, Warrenville
Tammy Whited: Grace McWayne Elementary, Batavia
Michael Zalokar: Rotolo Middle School, Batavia
Marcia Teckenbrock is the communications manager in the Office of the Chief Information Officer.
Also announces discovery of eleven stellar streams, evidence of small galaxies being eaten by the Milky Way
This image shows the full area of sky mapped by the Dark Energy Survey and the 11 newly discovered stellar streams. Four of the streams in this diagram — ATLAS, Molonglo, Phoenix and Tucana III – were previously known. The others were discovered using the Dark Energy Camera, one of the most powerful astronomical cameras on Earth. Image: Dark Energy Survey
At a special session held during the American Astronomical Society meeting in Washington, D.C., scientists on the Dark Energy Survey (DES) announced today the public release of their first three years of data. This first major release of data from the survey includes information on about 400 million astronomical objects, including distant galaxies billions of light-years away as well as stars in our own galaxy.
DES scientists are using this data to learn more about dark energy, the mysterious force believed to be accelerating the expansion of the universe, and presented some of their preliminary cosmological findings in the special session. As part of that session, DES scientists also announced today the discovery of 11 new stellar streams, remnants of smaller galaxies torn apart and devoured by our Milky Way.
The public release of the first three years of DES data fulfills a commitment scientists on the survey made to share their findings with the astronomy community and the public. The data cover the full DES footprint – about 5,000 square degrees, or one eighth of the entire sky — and include roughly 40,000 exposures taken with the Dark Energy Camera. The images correspond to hundreds of terabytes of data and are being released along with catalogs of hundreds of millions of galaxies and stars.
The Dark Energy Camera is mounted on the Blanco telescope in Chile. Photo: Fermilab
“There are all kinds of discoveries waiting to be found in the data. While DES scientists are focused on using it to learn about dark energy, we wanted to enable astronomers to explore these images in new ways, to improve our understanding of the universe,” said Dark Energy Survey Data Management Project Scientist Brian Yanny of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory.
“The great thing about a big astronomical survey like this is that it also opens a door to many other studies, like the new stellar streams,” added Adam Bolton, associate director for the Community Science and Data Center at the National Optical Astronomy Observatory (NOAO). “With the DES data now available as a ‘digital sky,’ accessible to all, my hope is that these data will lead to the crowdsourcing of new and unexpected discoveries.”
The DES data can be accessed online.
The Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile houses the Dark Energy Camera. Photo: Fermilab
The Dark Energy Camera, the primary observation tool of the Dark Energy Survey, is one of the most powerful digital imaging devices in existence. It was built and tested at Fermilab, the lead laboratory on the Dark Energy Survey, and is mounted on the National Science Foundation’s 4-meter Blanco telescope, part of the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile, a division of NOAO. The DES images are processed by a team at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
“We’re excited that this release of high-quality imaging data is now accessible to researchers around the world,” said Matias Carrasco Kind, DES release scientist at NCSA. “While DES was designed with the goal of understanding dark energy and dark matter, the huge amount of data in these images and catalogs will bring new scientific applications, challenges, and opportunities for discovery to astronomers and data scientists. In collaboration, NCSA, NOAO and the LIneA group in Brazil are providing the tools and resources to access and analyze this rich and robust data set.”
One new discovery enabled by the data set is the detection of 11 new streams of stars around our Milky Way. Our home galaxy is surrounded by a massive halo of dark matter, which exerts a powerful gravitational pull on smaller, nearby galaxies. The Milky Way grows by pulling in, ripping apart and absorbing these smaller systems. As stars are torn away, they form streams across the sky that can be detected using the Dark Energy Camera. Even so, stellar streams are extremely difficult to find since they are composed of relatively few stars spread out over a large area of sky.
“It’s exciting that we found so many stellar streams,” said astrophysicist Alex Drlica-Wagner of Fermilab. “We can use these streams to measure the amount, distribution and clumpiness of dark matter in the Milky Way. Studies of stellar streams will help constrain the fundamental properties of dark matter.”
Prior to the new discoveries by DES, only about two dozen stellar streams had been discovered. Many of them were found by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, a precursor to the Dark Energy Survey. The effort to detect new stellar streams in the Dark Energy Survey was led by University of Chicago graduate student Nora Shipp.
“We’re interested in these streams because they teach us about the formation and structure of the Milky Way and its dark matter halo. Stellar streams give us a snapshot of a larger galaxy being built out of smaller ones,” Shipp said. “These discoveries are possible because DES is the widest, deepest and best-calibrated survey out there.”
This image shows a portion of the sky mapped by the Dark Energy Survey. Stellar streams (including ones previously found) can be seen as yellow, blue and red streaks. Image: Dark Energy Survey
Since there is no universally accepted naming convention for stellar streams, the Dark Energy Survey has reached out to schools in Chile and Australia, asking young students to select names. Students and their teachers have worked together to name the streams after aquatic words in native languages from northern Chile and aboriginal Australia. Read more about the names in Symmetry magazine.
Read the papers drawn from the first years of DES data online. An animation of several of the newly discovered streams can be seen on Fermilab’s website.
DES plans one more major public data release, after the survey is completed, which will include nearly twice as many exposures as in this release.
“This result is an excellent example of how ‘data mining’ — the exploration of large data sets — leads to new discoveries,” said Richard Green, director of the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Division of Astronomical Sciences. “NSF is investing in this approach through our foundationwide ‘Harnessing the Data Revolution’ initiative, which is encouraging fundamental research in data science. We’re expecting a drumbeat of exciting discoveries, particularly when the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope data floodgates are opened!”
This work is supported in part by the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science.
The Dark Energy Survey is a collaboration of more than 400 scientists from 26 institutions in seven countries. Funding for the DES Projects has been provided by the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science, U.S. National Science Foundation, Ministry of Science and Education of Spain, Science and Technology Facilities Council of the United Kingdom, Higher Education Funding Council for England, ETH Zurich for Switzerland, National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Kavli Institute of Cosmological Physics at the University of Chicago, Center for Cosmology and AstroParticle Physics at Ohio State University, Mitchell Institute for Fundamental Physics and Astronomy at Texas A&M University, Financiadora de Estudos e Projetos, Fundação Carlos Chagas Filho de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado do Rio de Janeiro, Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico and Ministério da Ciência e Tecnologia, Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, and the collaborating institutions in the Dark Energy Survey, the list of which can be found at www.darkenergysurvey.org/collaboration.
Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory, National Optical Astronomy Observatory, is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy (AURA) under a cooperative agreement with the National Science Foundation. NSF is an independent federal agency created by Congress in 1950 to promote the progress of science. NSF supports basic research and people to create knowledge that transforms the future.
NCSA at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign provides supercomputing and advanced digital resources for the nation’s science enterprise. At NCSA, University of Illinois faculty, staff, students and collaborators from around the globe use advanced digital resources to address research grand challenges for the benefit of science and society. NCSA has been advancing one third of the Fortune 50® for more than 30 years by bringing industry, researchers and students together to solve grand challenges at rapid speed and scale. For more information, please visit www.ncsa.illinois.edu.
Fermilab is America’s premier national laboratory for particle physics and accelerator research. A U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science laboratory, Fermilab is located near Chicago, Illinois, and operated under contract by the Fermi Research Alliance LLC, a joint partnership between the University of Chicago and the Universities Research Association Inc. Visit Fermilab’s website at www.fnal.gov and follow us on Twitter at @Fermilab.
The DOE Office of Science is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States and is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, please visit science.energy.gov.
Secretary of Energy Rick Perry visited the U.S. Department of Energy’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory today, celebrating the lab’s 50 years of discovery and highlighting its bright future as the nation’s premier national laboratory for particle physics and accelerator research. Secretary Perry toured Fermilab’s extensive science and technology research complex and led a town hall meeting with lab employees and visiting scientists. Joining him on the tour was U.S. Congressman and former Fermilab physicist Bill Foster.
As the top official at the U.S. Department of Energy, the Secretary oversees Fermilab and the 16 other DOE National Laboratories that form the backbone of the nation’s scientific infrastructure. During his visit, Secretary Perry noted Fermilab’s unique role within the DOE lab system.
“DOE’s 17 laboratories are the crown jewels of American science,” Secretary Perry said. “As the nation’s leading particle physics lab, Fermilab plays a vital role in bringing the national and international high-energy physics community together in pursuit of great discoveries. The Long-Baseline Neutrino Facility and Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment, for instance, are a terrific example of continued U.S. leadership in this community.”
The visit highlighted Fermilab’s leadership as the host laboratory for LBNF/DUNE, the first international megascience experiment to be built at a U.S. DOE lab. While at Fermilab the Secretary visited several experiments focused on neutrinos — tiny particles that could hold the key to unlocking the mystery of why matter and the universe exist. Secretary Perry also spoke to lab scientists and engineers about the construction of LBNF/DUNE, which broke ground in July. This flagship project will send the world’s most intense beam of neutrinos from Fermilab in Illinois 800 miles through the earth to massive particle detectors, which will be built a mile underground in the Sanford Underground Research Facility in South Dakota.
“More than 1,000 scientists from 31 countries have signed on to the LBNF/DUNE project thanks to its potential for groundbreaking scientific discoveries and the strong leadership shown by DOE,” said Fermilab Director Nigel Lockyer. “We value the contributions from our international partners in the project and look forward to a new era of neutrino science.”
Among those international collaborations, Fermilab’s strong partnership with the European particle physics laboratory CERN on its Large Hadron Collider and Fermilab’s LBNF/DUNE project was discussed during the visit.
Fermilab’s expertise in engineering and technology development was also featured throughout the Secretary’s visit. A stop at the new Quantum Labs highlighted Fermilab’s successful R&D work towards advanced particle accelerator technologies and their potential applications to quantum sensors and quantum computers. Secretary Perry also visited the facility for PIP-II, an accelerator project that will provide the high-intensity, megawatt proton beam that is needed for generating the neutrino beam for LBNF/DUNE.
Secretary Perry also made a stop to inspect the laboratory’s famed herd of native American bison, a symbol of the laboratory’s commitment to stewardship of the environment and to building strong relationships with the surrounding communities. Fermilab’s STEM outreach programs also serve to build strong community partnerships and the next generation of science leaders.
The town hall meeting with lab employees and visiting scientists concluded the Secretary’s visit to Fermilab.
View a 3-minute video of Secretary Perry’s Jan. 9 visit to Fermilab. Watch Perry speak with Fermilab staff at the town-hall meeting.
