GW Explorer: A Beginner's Guide -- Developing a Computational Gravitational-Wave Outreach Curriculum for High School Students
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.
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BibTeX
@misc{langgin2026explorer,
title = {{GW Explorer: A Beginner's Guide -- Developing a Computational Gravitational-Wave Outreach Curriculum for High School Students}},
author = {Rachel Langgin and Bradlee Tejeda and Carl-Johan Haster},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = sep,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2609.10717},
eprint = {2609.10717},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.10717},
note = {CC BY 4.0},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - GW Explorer: A Beginner's Guide -- Developing a Computational Gravitational-Wave Outreach Curriculum for High School Students
AU - Rachel Langgin
AU - Bradlee Tejeda
AU - Carl-Johan Haster
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/09/09
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2609.10717
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.10717
AB - 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.
ER -