Description

Particle identities is an interactive online quiz created by the S'Cool LAB team at CERN. It engages users in discovering which elementary particle aligns with their personality, while simultaneously introducing some concepts of particle physics. All particle designs are kindly provided by The Particle Zoo. The quiz was developed using the open-source, cross-platform game engine GDevelop and it is available in multiple languages.

Scientists at CERN study the properties of elementary particles and their interactions with other particles. Learn more about CERN’s research programme here.

Material list

• Internet connection
• Smartphone, tablet, or computer

Instructions

• Access the Particle Identities quiz online: cern.ch/identities
• Follow the on-screen instructions to complete the quiz and discover your particle identity.

Ideas for Educators

• Take the quiz: Have your students go through the online quiz on their own to find out which particle fits their personality best.
• Write a particle ID card: The quiz includes a very short description of the respective particle at the end, but you can also encourage your students to find out more about their particle online. Students can, for example, write an ID card for their particle including its name, symbol, mass, electric charge, year of discovery, ...
• Compare particle ID cards: Students can compare each other's particles to find out, which particles share similar properties or which particles can interact with each other because they have the same type of charge.
• Play the quiz inversely: Once students understand the different particle properties, they can play the quiz in the other direction. How do you need to answer the quiz questions to end up as an anti-strange quark? or an electron? or an electron-neutrino?
• Can you find dark matter? A certain (hard to find) answer combination will disclose a hypothetical particle no one has discovered yet, so-called dark matter.

Related resources

• Read more about the Standard Model of Particle Physics and its compact description, the so-called Lagrangian, here: Woithe, J., Wiener, G. J., & Van der Veken, F. F. (2017). Let’s have a coffee with the Standard Model of particle physics! Physics Education, 52(3), 034001.
• Particle card game: To get familiar with the different elementary particles, students can use the particle cards developed by Netzwerk Teilchenwelt in the framework of different activities such as sorting exercises, triplet game, four corners game. A set of 61 particle cards is available in German, English and Spanish. You can find a description of the cards and ideas for different games in English here.
• Offline version of the quiz: Available for Windows , macOS and for Linux.
  • Windows: double click on the executable file to launch it
  • macOS: Control-click (or right click) the app icon, then choose Open from the shortcut menu.
  • Linux: On the command line: chmod +x Particle_Identities.AppImage or with the GUI : Right-click on the Particle_Identities.AppImage and click the ‘Properties’ entry, switch to the Permissions tab and click the ‘Allow executing file as program’ checkbox, close the dialog and double click the Particle_Identities.AppImage to run it.