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There is a great demand in today's society for young people trained in science and technology. To meet this demand it is important to both stimulate students into choosing the science program in high school and encourage those within the science program to study science at university level. It is important that students experience science and physics in particular as fun and exciting. One way to accomplish this is to expose high school students to exciting forefront physics. Traditionally, high school students have all but a cursory exposure to the most interesting and stimulating open questions in physics today. One example is the origin of ultra-high energy (> 10**20 eV) cosmic rays. Contemporary experiments dedicated to the study of this phenomena cost around 1 billion SEK, occupy land areas comparable with a large European town and have taken years to develop. The basic requirement for studying these cosmic rays are however straight-forward: a time correlated array of simple detectors spread over a large area to intercept the huge shower of particles produced in the Earth's atmosphere after the impact of a ultra-high energy cosmic ray.
The SEASA (Stockholm Eductional Air Shower Array) project aims to join forces with local schools in the study of ultra-high energy cosmic rays. It is proposed to equip schools with simple scintillator-based particle detectors and cheap GPS (Global Positioning Satellite) receviers that will allow precise timing synchronisaton between schools. The internet will be used to connect schools together - forming a sparse but large area array of particle detectors. It is envisaged that students will participate actively in the construction, testing and operation of their particle detectors and that such day-to-day involvement in a real research project will promote a stable and long-lasting relationship between the schools and AlbaNova.
The SEASA project will be reviewed and some initial 'proof-of-principle' results from a test station at AlbaNova presented. The status of similar pioneering projects in the USA and Canada will also be discussed. There will also be a brief discussion about how the SEASA principle can be extended and applied to the collection of other data (for example, temperatures, air quality, background radiation levels, etc.) over a large area. It is hoped that the discussion may stimulate others to apply similar ideas to other areas of physics as well.