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arXiv · 2609.10717

GW Explorer: A Beginner's Guide -- Developing a Computational Gravitational-Wave Outreach Curriculum for High School Students

Rachel Langgin·Bradlee Tejeda·Carl-Johan Haster
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Abstract

We present GW Explorer: A Beginner's Guide, an outreach curriculum designed to introduce high school students to gravitational-wave (GW) astrophysics through interactive Python Jupyter notebooks. Most existing GW resources target beginning audiences and advanced students, leaving a gap at the pre-college level that we directly address. The curriculum integrates foundational physics with hands-on computation implemented through both self-directed and workshop-based instructional formats. In the self-directed format, students completed the curriculum independently on cloud-based platforms such as Google Colab. During the workshop format, students worked through the same activities under the guidance of University of Nevada, Las Vegas graduate student mentors. Topics span gravity, spacetime, GW sources, interferometric detection, and data analysis. An implementation in local high school classrooms informed the content and pacing, and survey results demonstrate gains in conceptual understanding and coding confidence. GW Explorer offers a scalable, open-access framework for authentic astrophysics research in the high school classroom.

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Rachel Langgin, Bradlee Tejeda, Carl-Johan Haster. 2026-09-09. GW Explorer: A Beginner's Guide -- Developing a Computational Gravitational-Wave Outreach Curriculum for High School Students. https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.10717

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