Context
The European Organization for Nuclear Research, also known as CERN, is a European non-profit research organization that operates the largest particle physics laboratory in the world. They're the creators of the Large Hadron Collider and a small invention you may have heard of called the World Wide Web.March 2019 was the 30th anniversary of the World Wide Web, an invention that is taken for granted these days. Creating it, however, was no easy feat. CERN was experiencing great difficulties in sharing information. For a long time, different manufacturers created hardware with incompatible ways of communication. Data formats also varied wildly. HTML was invented as a user-friendly and pragmatic way of consistently formatting information, allowing links between pages (ie: HyperText links), and the WWW was created as a way to view remote pages.
The Event
Last weekend, 6 major community members - Jeija, Krock, nore, Orwell96, rubenwardy, and Shara - travelled to CERN to create an educational game about the World Wide Web. The game teaches kids about the research process needed to create something and demonstrate its value, such as the World Wide Web. In the process, players also learn what makes the Web function, and the ideas and major inventions that paved its creation.The collaborators arrived late on Thursday the 4th of July. On the morning of the 5th, CERN gave a tour of the campus, showing The Synchro-Cyclotron - CERN's first particle accelerator - and the computer center. The team talked with Dr Ben Segal, one of Tim Berners-Lee's mentors, who gave the team historical insight into how the Web was adopted first at CERN then by other research institutes, before going global. Ben also explained the data challenges that CERN has faced and is to this day constantly facing, in its race for discovering what matter is made of and how the universe was born.
The rest of the weekend was dedicated to development with breaks for food and social events. The event wrapped up at midday on Monday.
This event was kindly sponsored by the US Mission in Geneva.
What next?
The game will be played by school children at the "Coding Science" conference from 22nd to 24th November 2019.CERN will, at some point, publish press releases and videos. We will post them here when that happens.
Screenshots
GIF was converted by Benrob0329.
