Quantum literacy in secondary education: investigating gamified and experiential approaches to teaching quantum computing

Ελευθέριος Θ. Παπαδόπουλος

Gesche Pospiech

Rhea Fernandez, Sarah Hagstrom, Liesel Malanos +4 more

We conducted a literature review and expert interviews to determine the most common methods being used to teach quantum physics and quantum computing concepts to primary and secondary students. Based on the findings of this review, we provide a framework of seven categories of teaching approaches for teaching mathematically accessible quantum concepts; they are Defamiliarization, Quantum Picturalism, Spin-First Approach, Einstein-First Approach, Many Paths Approach, Historical Development Approach and Game-based Quantum Learning. We summarise each of these teaching methods and overview their advantages and disadvantages of each method. Our framework makes it easy for physics educators to embrace the diverse methods of teaching quantum physics and quantum computing at the primary and secondary level.

Alexander Zable, Lloyd C. L. Hollenberg, Eduardo Velloso +1 more

Quantum computing (QC) is an intrinsically complex yet exciting discipline with increasing practical relevance. A deep understanding of QC requires the integration of knowledge across numerous technical fields, such as physics, computing and mathematics. This work aims to investigate how immersive Virtual Reality (VR) compares to a desktop environment (‘web-applet’) as an educational tool to help teach individuals QC fundamentals. We developed two interactive learning tutorials, one utilising the ‘Bloch sphere’ visualisation to represent a single-qubit system, and the other exploring multi-qubit systems through the lens of ‘quantum entanglement’. We evaluate the effectiveness of each medium to teach QC fundamentals in a user study with 24 participants. We find that the Bloch sphere visualisation was well-suited to VR over a desktop environment. Our results also indicate that mathematics literacy is an important factor in facilitating greater learning with this effect being notably more pronounced when using VR. However, VR did not significantly improve learning in a multi-qubit context. Our work provides valuable insights which contribute to the emerging field of Quantum HCI (QHCI) and VR for education.

Wai Yie Leong

Srikanth Vadla

QuaSim uses a project-based virtual environment to teach students concepts of quantum cryptography. This gamified project contains different levels through which the students learn the subject matter in an interactive way. In order to improve student learning, QuaSim models student behavior via educational data mining. We calculate the performance and analyse the actions of the player, through which we can identify the student abilities and behavior patterns which allow us to draw conclusions about learning. The extracted patterns are then used to adapt the virtual environment in real time to improve student learning.