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When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, teachers everywhere found themselves dealing with the challenge of reaching students in spite of the lockdowns and social distancing rules that abruptly split classrooms apart.
Such was the case for the volunteers behind UC Santa Barbara’s Physics Circus, an interactive science outreach program offered to school-aged children by the university’s Department of Physics. Typically offered on site at local elementary schools as an assembly demonstration show or as part of an after school family science night, Physics Circus and its cadre of hardworking and enthusiastic students were suddenly cut off from their audience, stifled in their ability to bring physics to the kids.