Crowds of pre-university students attend CQT’s QCamps

20 June 2025

Some 80 students were introduced to all things quantum at CQT’s annual outreach camps

A mindblowing QCamp for participants and CQT volunteers alike.

Some 80 students chose to spend their June school holidays at CQT learning about quantum physics. CQT hosted these curious youths from 9 to 13 June for QCamp and on 18 June for Flash QCamp.

Run since 2015, QCamp is CQT’s annual outreach camp for pre-university students in Singapore. To accommodate the large number of students applying, CQT introduced Flash QCamp from 2024 as an additional one-day option.

This year, 37 students participated in QCamp and 44 students in Flash QCamp. The students came from 20 different schools and were among 147 total applicants.

“I loved the academic progression, appropriate tutorial timings, and the sheer variety of quantum things. Exactly what I envisioned, slay!” said one participant in QCamp. In surveys after both camps, all students said they would recommend their friends apply next year.

Powered by volunteers

The camps were organised by a committee of PhD students and researchers from CQT and the Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR). The committee members were CQT’s Ayesha Reezwana, Clara Yun Fontaine, Aw Cenxin Clive, Celine Trieu, Elizaveta Maksimova, Nigel Lee, and Vindhiya Prakash and A*STAR’s Lorcan Conlon and Ruvindha Lecamwasam.

Many more students and researchers volunteered their time to teach and run activities during the camps. They were also supported by the CQT admin and outreach teams.

Ayesha, who organised the Flash QCamp volunteers, said “We have all taken away something from the experience and more importantly, I hope that we were able to inspire the young minds who joined us.”

Two states of QCamp

The topics in QCamp’s five-day programme go far beyond the students’ syllabi in schools. They first get a historical perspective of how quantum physics underlies modern technologies and what it might mean for future technologies. Then, they get comfortable with complex numbers and linear algebra before delving into topics such as superposition, qubits, Schrödinger’s equation, and entanglement.

Other parts of the programme include hands-on sessions on quantum computation and and quantum key distribution, discussion circles and a careers panel.

The career session provided “valuable insights from people who have careers that I would consider pursuing in the future,” said one student.

Students also saw experiments at A*STAR’s Quantum Innovation Centre. Visiting labs, wrote one student in their feedback, “motivated me to work harder to aim to work in research”.

Fun was on the agenda too, with a social night and games held during the week. “I realllyyyy enjoyed how QCamp is planned like there was really a good balance between learning and enjoying,” read another response in the survey.

(Front row, from left) QCamp committee member Clive Aw moderates a career panel featuring Ramon Paniagua-Dominguez from A*STAR’s Institute of Materials Research and Engineering (IMRE), CQT’s Moritz Mihm, and two CQT PhD graduates, Pooja Jayachandran, Senior Scientist at Horizon Quantum and Cai Yu, a quantum communication applied scientist at HSBC

Flash QCamp on 18 June had a condensed programme of lectures, career sharing and the choice of small group lab tours or a hands-on quantum computation and algorithms workshop.

The shorter programme still made an impact. Sharing feedback at the end, one student said, “The camp was a novel experience for me, and has definitely widened my perspective on the field of quantum physics”.