In Pursuit of Authenticity – CMS Open Data in Education

There are some universally acknowledged problems in school sciences. In developed countries worldwide, young people are not interested in studying STEM subjects. Whether that is because of perceived lack of personal relevance, disconnect from the actual fields of study, “sanitized” school practices or other factors is a matter of debate, but it is eminently clear that, as educators, we must do our best to combat this trend. In this paper, we discuss how open data from the CMS experiment has been used in education and present feedback from Finnish teachers who have received training in using these freely available programming resources to bring modern physics into their teaching. The main focus here is on the teachers' perception of authenticity in the use of “real world” research data, although there is an additional benefit of learning general scientific methods and cross-disciplinary data handling skills as well.