With PhysicsQuest, middle-schoolers learn with quantum algorithm dances and entangled playing cards

Quantum mechanics has a long-standing reputation as one of the trickiest and least intuitive branches of physics. For many, quantum physics lessons bring to mind chalkboards covered with equations, describing phenomena that seem too bizarre to be real.

But this year, a team of educators set out to teach quantum mechanics to children in a different way — with coin tosses, card games, and dance.

The APS PhysicsQuest program develops lesson plans for middle school students, bringing concepts from modern physics research into the classroom with hands-on activities. For this year’s lessons, the PhysicsQuest team focused on quantum mechanics and quantum computing for the International Year of Quantum Science and Technology.

Past iterations of the program delved into plasma, waves, and careers in physics, and were developed by APS staff and members. This year similarly involved APS members in the creative process, particularly those from the society’s Division of Atomic, Molecular, and Atomic Physics and the Division of Quantum Information.

“If we have 50,000 physics experts as our members, we should be utilizing their expertise and helping them connect to the public in meaningful ways,” says Nicole Schrode, the APS program manager for public engagement.

Twenty-two APS members developed activities to teach quantum-related concepts, and five K-12 teachers participated in a pilot program to test the lessons and provide feedback. In the end, APS sent out 829 activity kits to classrooms across all 50 states and Puerto Rico, potentially reaching over 100,000 students. With this new model for PhysicsQuest, APS helped participating physicists reach a wide audience, aiming “to empower all scientists to conduct outreach as part of their position,” says Schrode.

Teaching quantum physics to middle-schoolers was a challenge. “The tricky part is, when you're speaking about quantum mechanics, there is no analogy with normal physics — but when we're teaching, we still need to use analogy,” explains Danyel Cavazos, laboratory instructor at the University of Chicago and designer of the “entangled and shuffled” card game in PhysicsQuest 2025.

His strategy is to use analogy to your advantage as a teacher, identifying both the parts that work and the parts that break down in the quantum realm to highlight the differences between classical and quantum physics. But using those concrete objects to build students’ intuition is crucial. A student may think, “if you can explain it using normal objects, objects that I know and understand, then maybe I can do more with quantum mechanics myself later on,” he adds.

Cavazos’ lesson uses playing cards to teach students about the Bell Inequality, a limit of probability that only quantum entanglement can surpass. Playing cards are a helpful tool to learn about basic probability, which can then be expanded to the correlations in an entangled system. One teacher even told Cavazos that some of her students changed the rules of the game a bit, and got a result that had some interesting physical meaning — they ended up dabbling in theories that go beyond the limits of even quantum mechanics. “I think it shows that the game really is getting down to something, because then the students themselves are taking it and using it to understand something that even I didn't intend to,” he says. "Once you get a lesson out there, then it's kind of alive, and it just turns into its own thing.”

Another activity turns students into qubits, using their arms to represent the qubit’s state: zero, one, or a superposition of the two. They move around, applying different logic gates to their qubits, resulting in a dance that represents a quantum computing algorithm. Dominique Wolfshagen, a science outreach professional and one of the creators of the 2-Qubit dance, found it interesting to explore how students can “learn through play, or they develop curiosity, or even frustration of not knowing why it works that way.”

Wolfshagen — a biochemist by training, now a physics educator — appreciated how the PhysicsQuest lessons found a new way to teach difficult concepts. She jokingly recalled how her physics colleagues would say about quantum mechanics, “Oh, it’s easy. You look at the math!” She adds, “the challenge is to translate things that are often well-expressed in math, and make them understandable without the math.”

Other lessons explore quantum teleportation with coins, use augmented reality to think about qubits, and visualize crystal lattices with ping-pong balls. All were a hit with students. “I was testing all these labs with my students, and they really loved it,” says Nataliya Fletcher, a physics teacher in Florida who pilot-tested the PhysicsQuest quantum lessons.

APS members and participating teachers got a lot out of the activities, as well. “Working on and implementing PhysicsQuest lessons gave me additional opportunities for my own learning and being able to share that experience with my students,” says Ann-Marie Dubick, who teaches STEM to sixth through eighth graders and who participated in the lesson testing. Fletcher adds, PhysicsQuest has “given me a really great opportunity to not just grow personally, but actually see how my experiences can help other teachers.”

For Cavazos, PhysicsQuest provided inspiration for his college courses, and Wolfshagen said the process helped her learn new research-backed education methods.

All PhysicsQuest lessons, from 2025 and previous years, are available for free on the APS website. APS encourages educators to download, use, and adapt PhysicsQuest resources in their own classrooms.