Masterclass: “Hands on CERN”

The opportunity to work for the first time with real data from the LHC experiments, at CERN, becomes reality for students around the world through the Masterclass Hands on CERN, the outreach activity organized by CERN where more than 10000 students from 37 countries and 160 universities take part each year. Through video conferencing students from different countries get together to discuss the results of their analysis using events from ATLAS, CMS, or ALICE experiments , coordinated by 2 physicists at CERN, or Fermilab. The goal is to give students a glimpse of the routine work of physicists within the international collaborations that assemble and perform these experiments. The official language is English. The Internacional Masterclass - Hands on Particle Physics is heavily based on computing technologies. The World Wide Web plays a major role allowing the videoconferences, the access to the data from the LHC experiments. Facebook has been added to the facilities the students can use to access all the information about the Masterclass and plan their participation. We will report about our experience in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, working with the Masterclass, where the World Wide Web is also used to explain the introductory concepts of Particle Physics. Sites with introductory explanations, some of them in Portuguese, can be accessed any time by the students. Local pages on Facebook allows them to be in contact with the physicists taking part in the project. E-mail is normally used by their teachers. Skype allows meetings, conversations and even short courses with students and teachers far away from our university. Altogether bringing them into the HEP world.