In the Bowen High School gym on Chicago’s Southeast Side one night last month, a young girl stood with a doughnut in her hand and a blue balloon tied around her wrist. The doughnut had a sugar decal with an icon depicting quantum entanglement, and the balloon featured a geometric object called a Bloch sphere and the word “qubit.”
Young children don’t typically know a lot about quantum science, but understanding the physics of nature’s smallest scales wasn’t necessary. Instead, the Quantum Game Night — hosted by the Chicago Quantum Exchange (CQE) and featuring the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering’s (PME) STAGE Center, the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign’s (UIUC) LabEscape, and others — was meant to introduce the local community to quantum technology through games and activities.
Held in conjunction with the CQE’s seventh annual Chicago Quantum Summit, the game night, which drew about 150 people, was an early step toward inviting the broader public to engage with the field at a pivotal time in the development of the Midwest’s quantum economy.
“It was absolutely a phenomenal event,” Bowen Principal Priscilla Horton said. “Programs and events like these provide exposure and learning experiences that create positive futures for students. My students had an amazing time. They are asking for more events like this one. More importantly they are beginning to say, ‘I can do that.’”
Communities in Chicago — and throughout the Midwest — will be an important part of commercializing and scaling the quantum technology industry, which is in a period of growth. Last year, a region that includes parts of Illinois, Wisconsin, and Indiana was designated by the US Economic and Development Administration as a US Tech Hub for quantum technologies, and this summer Illinois Governor JB Pritzker announced the Illinois Quantum and Microelectronics Park (IQMP), a first-of-its-kind park for quantum scale-up and related research to be developed a mile and a half from Bowen High School. In addition, the Midwest region has attracted more than $1 billion in corporate and government investment, including $500 million from the State of Illinois to help launch the IQMP and associated initiatives. And last month, a cross-sector, CQE-led coalition that includes partners in Illinois, Wisconsin, and Indiana advanced in the US National Science Foundation Engines (NSF Engines) competition.
“The Midwest is fast becoming one of the globe’s leading quantum innovation zones, and to achieve its potential, the full region needs to join in these efforts,” said Kate Timmerman, the CEO of the Chicago Quantum Exchange. “That means working with entire communities, from individual schools to whole states. Our goal with Quantum Game Night was to provide fun, family-friendly ways for the Bowen community to learn about quantum science. We hope to make quantum technology familiar and accessible — and to inspire young people to pursue this field and ultimately become the leaders who launch quantum companies that will employ tens of thousands of people in the region over the next decade.”
Connecting in ‘powerful ways’
Quantum Game Night included computer and card games from the STAGE Center, which give players of all backgrounds an understanding of the various core principles of quantum science in entertaining, hands-on encounters; a science-based escape room from LabEscape, an outreach program created by the physics department at UIUC; a quadcopter drone used by researchers at UIUC to transmit quantum information; zines from the NSF Enabling Practical-scale Quantum Computing (EPiQC) Expedition; and coloring books from UIUC’s Public Quantum Network.
“It was actually good!” the girl with the blue balloon said about the event.
“The highest praise a kid can give,” wryly noted nearby Jake Spangler, Bowen’s resident principal.
“And you know it’s true, because she’s always brutally honest,” said the girl’s mother, Taja Mallett. Mallett’s older daughter, the girl’s sister, attends Bowen.
As attendees filed into the gym for the event, some looked unsure as they circled the room eyeing games. Many flocked first to the food, which was provided by Chico’s Oven, a small mom-and-pop shop in the Bush neighborhood that sells doughnuts, coffee, Bolillo sandwiches, and pizza. The shop is owned by two longtime residents who attended the IQMP announcement in July with a banner welcoming the park’s anchor tenant, PsiQuantum.
Bit by bit, though, both kids and adults began joining games. They signed up for rounds of LabEscape, scrutinizing clues in the science-based puzzles and occasionally looking to UIUC Professor Paul Kwiat, the game’s creator, for hints. They joined Vegas-meets-science card games, chatting with the UChicago students in charge.
Soon, the gym was filled with laughter.
Chloe Washabaugh, a PME graduate student who volunteers with the STAGE Center, ran one of the games entirely in Spanish at the request of some of the participants.
“I wasn’t sure how to say superposition in Spanish, so I just said ‘superpositión,’” she said with a laugh.
STAGE—Scientists, Technologists and Artists Generating Exploration—is a full-scale laboratory, focused on creating and developing new theater, film, games, and other artistic endeavors inspired by science and technology. The games—which the center has taken to Japan and Switzerland as part of its mission to promote understanding of the sciences “through new forms of artistic expression”—incorporate the principles of quantum science into game play and visuals, an approach that replaces words and equations with memorable, hands-on, cooperative learning to convey the concepts. They are largely run by UChicago students.
“Emotional engagement and entertainment can connect people to science in powerful ways that leave a lasting impression,” said UChicago Professor Nancy Kawalek, the STAGE Center’s founding director. “That’s why the arts and games are so effective at getting the public interested in a counter-intuitive field like quantum science.”
A First Step
The proximity of the event to the IQMP was no accident; the park is located on the site of the former US Steel South Works plant which, at its peak before it closed 30 years ago, employed around 20,000 people. Community members are eager to ensure the quantum park will inject economic opportunity and accessible jobs into a neighborhood they feel has suffered from underinvestment since the plant shut down. Bowen was also chosen because one of its teachers, Adam Davenport, has participated for years in TeachQuantum, a program that immerses high school teachers in quantum research labs and prepares them to teach quantum-focused STEM concepts in their classrooms.
Quantum, which is poised to impact many industries from medicine to national security, is often seen as a difficult and exclusive field aimed only at PhDs. This is no longer true; in fact, many of the often well-paid positions in the field are open to those without graduate degrees — a message leaders say is important to communicate.
“For this sector to grow, we need workers with a wide range of experience and levels of education,” said David Awschalom, the Liew Family Professor in Molecular Engineering at the University of Chicago, a scientist at Argonne National Laboratory, and the director of the Chicago Quantum Exchange. “This is an important focus for the CQE and our community: helping to build a workforce of quantum engineers and other roles through education and training programs, and by capturing the interest of the young people who represent quantum technology’s future.”
A recent CQE analysis of job postings maintained by QED-C and the Quantum Computing Report showed that more than half of jobs in quantum are open to those with a bachelor’s degree, an associate’s degree, or no degree at all. The percentage was even higher in the industry sector, where about two-thirds of jobs were open to candidates with a bachelor’s degree or less. Instead, many employers said they seek creativity, basic retraining, and skills developed in other fields.
The key now is to reach curious and engaged young people from a variety of backgrounds.
According to several of the participants, Game Night was a good start.
Mallett’s son, who particularly enjoyed UIUC’s LabEscape, knew exactly what he wanted from future events: “More escape rooms.”