Teaching Quantum Computing to Public High Schoolers Across the Bay
How can the cat be dead and alive? No matter whether you’re in middle school or a PhD in mathematics, quantum is unintuitive. The behavior of quantum object goes against everything that we experience in our lives. It’s also a scary word, and pairing it with computing makes it all the more terrifying, enough for you to take one look at it as a high schooler and say, “Nope, not for me”. But that couldn’t be further from the truth, quantum computing (QC) is all about developing an intuition, and there is no better time to learn than when you are in high school!
The SQCA is partnering with quantum computing (QC) startup qBraid to teach a high school introductory course on QC. qBraid shares our mission to improve quantum computing visibility and literacy of quantum computing literacy, and developed a introductory QC curriculum called Qubes which they taught for the first time in Hanover over the Winter 2020. Their course materials are uniquely interactive and easy to use, for example their textbook is an interactive Jupyter notebook that has editable, runnable inline code. And the best part about it - all you need is high school algebra.
The syllabus focuses on giving students the initial tools to understand quantum computing, such as linear algebra, basic quantum mechanics and then teaches the basics of qubits and quantum gates. At the end of the course we go learn some Qiskit and to start being able to write their own quantum programs as well as some real world applications such as the BB84 protocol. Following the success of their first course, they extended their program and partnered with the SQCA to teach the course to public high school students across the bay area. Every week, students meet with instructors for an hour and a half for a classroom session over zoom. Students are then given optional homework and can attend office hours to tackle these together as well as pursue extracurricular topics. In addition, the class culminates in an optional project in which students can apply what they’ve learned to real life situations / problems with the mentorship of their instructors. Most importantly we want students to be able to gain as much as possible from the class, and so have made sure to create an individualized experience by capping each section with 30 students and having several instructors accessible to them!
In the spring of 2021, we had three instructors teaching 3 groups of around 25 students and have plans to have nomination schemes for underrepresented students in STEM for upcoming iterations of the course!