GW Explorer Workshop at Las Vegas Academy

On November 5, 2025, the GW Explorer Volunteer Crew of UNLV Astronomy PhD students hosted an afterschool Gravitational-Wave Workshop at the Las Vegas Academy of the Arts, led by Mrs. Teresa Prezgay’s advanced mathematics students. The workshop introduced students to Gravitational-Wave science through interactive Jupyter Notebooks, a tabletop interferometer demonstration, and discussions about how math connects to astrophysics.

The GW Explorer Project is designed to make Gravitational-Wave astronomy accessible to students at the high school and early undergraduate level. By combining hands-on experiments with interactive Jupyter notebooks, the project helps students build intuition about how detectors like LIGO, Virgo, and KAGRA measure distortions in spacetime caused by the merger of compact binary objects.

Workshop Highlights

The workshop began with introductions from the volunteer crew and a short mini-lecture on astronomical concepts the students would be dealing with in the notebooks, like stars and black holes.

The GW Explorer Volunteer Crew introducing themselves to the class.

Group photo of the GW Explorer crew and Las Vegas Academy students.

Students explored GW Explorer Notebook 1 (NB1) — an interactive activity that brings Einstein’s ideas about spacetime, gravity, and black holes to life. With guidance from volunteers, the students discovered how these concepts combine to produce Gravitational-Waves, using interactive Python widgets that let them experiment with the underlying equations themselves.

Madeline Overton guiding a student through Gravitational-Wave simulations.

Leah Green introducing the GW Explorer NB1 notebook to students.

Discussing binary black holes and Gravitational-Wave signals.

Volunteers helping students interpret signals and patterns in the data.

Madeline Overton and Ted Johnson assisting during the workshop.

Binary Black Holes in Action

The first notebook session concluded with an interactive visualization of a binary black hole inspiral, explaining how Gravitational-Wave signals evolve as two massive objects merge.

After experiencing the binary black hole animation, students dove into hands-on experiments with the tabletop interferometer, observing how Gravitational-Waves cause tiny, measurable shifts in distance. Volunteers guided them step by step, linking theory from NB1 to real-world physics.

Using the wave nature of light, the interferometer splits a laser beam into two paths that reflect back and overlap, forming an interference pattern–the superposition of combined light waves. When one path changes length by even a fraction of a wavelength, the pattern shifts revealing changes in distance. This simple setup demonstrates the same principle used by LIGO–the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory–to detect Gravitational-Waves from merging black holes billions of light-years away.

Students experimenting with the tabletop interferometer setup.

Hands-on exploration of how Gravitational-Waves change measurable distances that can be detected through light.

Volunteers explaining how light interference can reveal tiny displacements.

This particular workshop held a special meaning: the class was taught by Mrs. Teresa Prezgay, who also happened to be my former calculus teacher at Las Vegas Academy. Years ago, I gave my first math-related presentation in her class—on astrophysics—after a simple online search for “careers that use math.” I recently found the presentation that showed how to calculate the orbits of the Earth and Moon by using Kepler’s Third Law. That small assignment set me on the path toward astrophysics in college and, eventually, Gravitational-Wave research today.

Now, one of her current students, Bradlee Tejeda, volunteered with the GW research group at UNLV collaborating on designing this interactive notebook series. Watching Bradlee help lead the same kind of classroom activity that once inspired me was a reminder of how mentorship and curiosity can be extremely rewarding. We were thrilled to hear that the class enjoyed the experience so much that we’ve been invited back for another session in February!

Explore the Project

You can explore the GW Explorer: A Beginner’s Guide project at rachellanggin.com/tutorials!

These resources are open for educators, students, and outreach groups interested in bringing Gravitational-Wave science into the classroom. If you’re interested in hosting a workshop at your school or institution, please contact me at langgin@unlv.nevada.edu.

I’m grateful to Las Vegas Academy, Mrs. Prezgay, and the GW Explorer Volunteer Crew: Leah Green, Madeline Overton, Ted Johnson, and Bradlee Tejeda—for making this event possible and for helping expand access to Gravitational-Wave education.