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Tohoku University held its Open Campus on July 30 - 31, attracting some 60,000 visitors, including elementary, junior high and high school students from around the region. The popular annual event is a showcase of the university's education, research and social programmes, and gives prospective students a sense of campus life.

As part of the Chicago-Tohoku Quantum Alliance Week, seven faculty members and students from the University of Chicago' STAGE Lab (Scientists, Technologists, and Artists Generating Exploration) were in Sendai to participate in Open Campus. They hosted an exhibition and an interactive games corner, designed to demystify the principles of quantum mechanics.

Developed in the STAGE Lab during the pandemic lockdown, Quantum Games uses the familiar setting of board and computer games to introduce participants to the probabilistic nature of quantum events. Through games of chance that mimic quantum phenomena such as superposition and entanglement, players gain a hands-on understanding of these complex concepts.

"STAGE is an initiative that aims to bridge the gap between the arts and sciences," said Nancy Kawalek, Director of the STAGE Lab. "We're a full-scale lab embedded within the Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering and we create theatre pieces, films, games, all sorts of artistic endeavours that are designed to reach the public, capture their imagination and get them excited about science. We also want our young scientists to learn how to explain their work without jargon, to make it interesting using simple language, so that's one of the reasons we are here."

With the participation of Tohoku University students, who provided Japanese language translation for a truly bi-lingual experience, the Quantum Games corner was so popular that there were crowds of more than 700 people over the two days waiting for the chance to play the games.

"I am pleasantly surprised by how good some of the young students are at these games," said Yoichiro Tanaka, Tohoku University's Special Advisor for Global Co-creation. "Quantum technology is going to be very important, so we must engage young people now when they are still open-minded and can easily adapt to new things. Hopefully, events like this and the games they play today will spark an interest in learning the real physics of quantum technology in the future."

The Chicago-Tohoku Quantum Alliance was established in 2023 to support the development of quantum technology across Japan by offering programmes accessible to the public. It also aims to promote joint research between the University of Chicago and Tohoku University in the field of quantum science, and to facilitate student exchanges, collaboration with industry, and the acceleration of startups.

"When students from Tohoku University come over to Chicago and work in the science labs, we hope that some of their time would also be spent working with our STAGE Lab, where they can learn science communication skills and more about our projects, and then bring some of that back here to Japan," said Kawalek.