A cool Web challenge on a hot weekend
The CERN Summer Student Webfest took place last weekend and brought dozens of young web enthusiasts to the Main Auditorium. Fifteen projects were presented in the Friday pitching session and after that the challenge was launched. And the winner is…
Five of the six members of the team behind the “Mother hunting” project during a brainstorming session. Image: Jiannan Zhang.
… the “Mother hunting” game! An end-state particle explores CERN to try to reconstruct his (or her) family history of decay mothers and ancestors. Along the way, the particle meets famous physicists who teach it physics. A globe sphinx asks physics questions before the player can progress to various stages (read the game description on the dedicated page). Targeted at high school students, the game features very appealing 3D graphics, which accurately reproduce the layout of CERN.
“Mother hunting” was one of the 15 projects presented at the CERN Webfest, an event organised by the Citizen Cyberscience Centre, a partnership involving CERN, the University of Geneva and the UN Institute for Training and Research. “CERN is a natural host for this sort of gathering, sometimes called hackfests,” says François Grey, co-ordinator of the Citizen Cyberscience Centre. “Science laboratories like CERN build their success on the creativity of their staff. With the CERN Summer Student Webfest, we give summer students a chance to demonstrate their creativity and software skills, too. This is particularly important in a field like IT where things move extremely fast. Some of these students are on the cutting edge of what can be done with open-source software and data visualization tools.”
This year’s call for project proposals was very successful: the projects ranged from solutions for scientists and developers to collaborate on projects, to games based on physics for kids and students. Twelve projects survived the intensive weekend. “Judging was even more difficult this year than last year. There were many good ideas. I think some of them have real potential to be taken up by the particle physics community,” says John Ellis, a long-time theorist at CERN and a member of the Webfest jury.
2013 “ Webfesters” group photo. Image: Julie Gould.
One of the members of the winning team will be invited to go to the Mozilla Festival that will be held in London in October. After a very busy and intense weekend, the work of the Webfest participants will not stop. Several of them will continue working on their projects and try to encourage open-source communities to join them. If you missed the fun and you want to catch up with one or more of these projects and participate throughout the summer, join the CERN Webfest Facebook group.
| I liked… Some quotes from the participating students: “… that everyone was able to sit down and work on a project together! As summer students, we see each other socially but only get to work with one or two of our peers, if at all. This gave us a chance to build a working relationship and pick up some valuable skills.” “… the chance to work together with people I'd never seen before on a really cool project I could never have started myself.”“… the quality and the variety of different projects.” “… becoming part of a team that self structures and works in total harmony for a nice project! - No civilian casualties observed.” |
