Two states of QCamp for pre-university students

Achievement unlocked: The QCamp student participants successfully completed QCamp! They are pictured here with some of the CQT QCamp volunteers.

June is the month for QCamp, our annual outreach camp on quantum technologies. This year, QCamp came in two states for pre-university students. In addition to our usual five-day QCamp, which ran from 10 June to 14 June, we held a one-day Flash QCamp on 19 June to cater for the large number of students applying.

In total, 38 students from 19 junior colleges and polytechnics in Singapore were selected to join QCamp, and another 65 students joined Flash QCamp.

Both camps were planned by a CQT PhD student committee supported by CQT’s admin and outreach team. The committee members were Clara Fontaine, Fernando Valadares, Aw Cenxin Clive, Zaw Lin Htoo, Wu Shuin Jian, Celine Trieu, Elizaveta Maksimova, Chee Chong Hian and Chen Jinyan. Many more researchers and students volunteered their time to teach and run activities.

“Most enlightening”

The students who attended QCamp had high praise for it. In a post-camp survey, one student said “I thoroughly enjoyed the camp, thank you to the organisers and facilitators for making this camp so eventful !! I now consider CQT as a potential educational pathway in future.” Another student said, “Honestly, it's one of the best, most enlightening and fun enrichment programmes I have attended!”

The camp features lectures and tutorials on topics such as Schrödinger’s Equation, optical qubits and quantum chemistry. They also learnt how to approach scientific papers on different quantum themes with QCamp facilitators in “Journal Club” sessions, visited labs at CQT and the Institute of Materials Research and Engineering (IMRE) at the Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR), and got hands-on with a quantum key distribution kit.

CQT PhD student Huang Ni-ni (in black) leads the QCamp student participants for a lab tour.

Some of the camp’s activities were less directly academic. Discussions circles saw students discussing career perspectives, quantum ethics, philosophy and pop culture. The students also had a dedicated session about building careers with Lum Chune Yang, co-founder and CEO of SpeQtral, a CQT spin-off that is building space-based quantum communication systems.

The QCamp programme wrapped up with QQuest. Game master Elizaveta masterminded puzzles for the students, one for each of CQT’s six floors. Elizaveta created a new quantum card game (pictured) for one of the challenges this year. With the cards they had in hand, students had to reproduce quantum experiments such as the double-slit experiment and the Michelson interferometer.

The card game created and hand-made by Elizaveta for QCamp.

Giving feedback, one student said, “Each activity was well thought of and the physical, mind team games really helped to bond us as a team.”

Flash QCamp

QCamp has run since 2015. For the first time, QCamp’s programme was adapted into a one-day programme for a larger group of 65 students on 19 June. The programme reprised some of the lectures, and split the student participants into three smaller groups for activities: lab tours, a quantum programming session led by the National Quantum Computing Hub’s team, and a career discussion panel.

One student who attended the lab tours said in a post-camp survey that it was “very very cool, nice to see how everything works here” and another appreciated having “an insider view of a lab working space (not as messy as i expected)”. On the programming workshop, another student said, “I like how I got to experience quantum physics in computing and learning all the codes and seeing them worked made it very nice.”

The career panel featured CQT Research Fellow Alexander Hue and CQT alumni Angelina Frank and Aitor Villar Zafra. Angelina is now a Technical Product Manager at Horizon Quantum Computing and Aitor is a Lead Quantum Engineer at SpeQtral. The students appreciated the panelists’ authenticity with one saying, “The guests were from diverse and unique backgrounds and they answered every question with a very real, open and honest answer”.

We were happy to welcome 65 students for our very first Flash QCamp!

QCamp is not finished just yet! On 25 June, CQT will host a teacher’s version, tQCamp, for some 10 physics and engineering teachers from junior colleges and polytechnics, together with staff from Singapore’s Ministry of Education.