January 2012
Mr. DeWolf writes:
I wanted to share this with you about one of the students I had on our team that
explored star formation in Lynds dark nebulae (LDNs) several years ago. Justin Boerma
is a student at Michigan Tech University and is involved in their Aerospace Enterprise
program as an electrical engineering major.
This is from their website: On January 17 Michigan Tech University was chosen as the
winning school in the Air Force Research Laboratory's University Nanosatellite flight
competition review (FCR). Michigan Tech will now receive a two-year follow-on contract
from AFOSR to perform final integration and testing of the spacecraft to prepare it
for launch and also to construct a ground-control station on campus. The DoD Space
Test Program will launch the MTU satellite into low-Earth orbit in 2013. The
spacecraft will complete a one-year nominal mission controlled from MTU. The satellite
has been completely designed and built by MTU undergraduate students during a
four-year program.
Justin has often thanked me for getting him involved in NITARP research, having used
that experience, in part, to get access to programs such as MTU's Aerospace
Enterprise.
August 2011
Mr. DeWolf writes:
This past school year saw many exciting events occur. First, a change
in the curriculum was approved by our Board of Education. Astronomy is
now a 2 trimester course, with the 2nd trimester focusing on
opportunities for student research. I am looking forward to many more
students becoming involved in authentic research using available archival
data. We also had a team of students involved in the Student PI
(Planetary Investigators) program - a "spinoff" of the Mars
Exploration Student Data Teams project out of Arizona State
University. They entered a project in our regional science and
engineering fair that characterized the suitability of 10 potential
landing sites for manned lunar missions based on data from the Lunar
Reconnaissance Orbiter. Another student worked on investigating
correlations between solar flares and changes in Earth's magnetic
field using data from our THEMIS magnetometer and the ACE spacecraft
data archive. He placed 2nd in our regional fair and presented his
project at the National Consortium of Specialized Secondary Schools of
Mathematics, Science, and Technology annual student research
symposium.
I have also become involved with the NASA Explorer School program, and
was awarded a teacher recognition program workshop through a
competitive application process. I attended The Solar System Inside
and Out workshop in July at the Space Telescope Science Institute in
Baltimore, MD. One of the sessions was about using the Hubble Legacy
Archive - another great resource for my students to access this coming
school year. I am also now part of the Airborne Astronomy Ambassadors
program of NASA's SOFIA mission as one of the first teachers in the
pilot group of 6 from across the country. I will be spreading the word
about infrared astronomy at a number of upcoming teacher workshops.
May 2011
Mr. DeWolf flew on SOFIA as part of the inaugural Airborne
Ambassadors program!
January 2011
Mr. DeWolf writes:
Much has happened, is happening, and hopefully will happen at
Chippewa Hills High School. Last year I was chosen as one of Cohort
II in the NASA Endeavor Fellow program and have actively been
pursuing my certification from Teachers College at Columbia University
as a STEM master teacher. We also had a team of students pursue
research on the effects of solar wind on Earth's geomagnetic field as
part of the school's involvement in the E/PO of the THEMIS mission,
out of the Space Science Laboratory at UC Berkeley. And we have become
involved in the Mars Student Data Exploration Teams (MESDT) project,
with students interacting with mission scientists in after school
teleconferences.
This year I have earned two distinctions. I was named the Outstanding
Earth Science Teacher of 2010 for the state of Michigan by the
Michigan Earth Science Teachers Association. I also was recently named
as one of 37 teachers for the latest round of teacher liaisons for the
Space Foundation. This year we have extended our involvement in
Arizona State University's MESDT program to a spin-off: Planetary
Investigators (PI). I have a team of students involved in working with
data from the mini-RF instrument onboard the Lunar Reconnaissance
Orbiter, looking for the best place for a potential lunar base, based
on the availability of water ice. They also meet once a month after
school and discuss mission science with NASA scientists involved in
the project.
Our department is working on curriculum proposals for next year that
will expand Earth & Space Science back to a 2 Trimester course, and
add a 2nd trimester of astronomy as well. These will provide
additional opportunities for us to include NASA resources - and
student research - into our science curriculum at Chippewa Hills High
School
August 2010
Mr. DeWolf writes:
Students at Chippewa Hills High School continue to be active in
astronomical research, building on what had been done in the past via
our experience with the Spitzer Student and Teacher Research program.
This past school year our astronomy class became involved with the
Mars Exploration Student Data Teams (MESDT) project. We participated
in a number of teleconferences and look forward to doing a project
with this group this fall. Several other students alo did projects for
our regional ISEF affiliated science fair. One team worked with
archived data from both the THEMIS and ACE missions, looking at
connections between solar wind particle density and changes in our
planetary magnetic field. This project won a special award from NOAA
at our science fair. The other project looked at how solar activity
affects cloud cover on Earth using data from multiple sources.
I look forward to working with more students and their research
projects during the upcoming school year.
January-April 2009
The three students on the CHHS Spitzer Team, Justin Boerma, Stephen Brock,
and Trevor DeWolf, took what they learned at the AAS and completed a
project that looked more closely at LDN 981 to determine if it had ongoing
star formation. Their project, Star Formation in Isolated Dark Nebulae:
YSOs in LDN 981, was entered in the MOISD Regional Science &
Engineering Fair in March. They won Top Team and will be competing at the
Intel ISEF in Reno, Nevada, in May. Their paper (of the same title) was
submitted for publication in the 2009 RBSE Journal.
The
students were interviewed by the local newspaper - the Big Rapids Pioneer.
This interview was part of a larger article on the science fair. An
article was also submitted to the Chippewa Hills School District
Communicator, their district newsletter that goes out to all families living
in the district. It will be in the May issue and is available at this URL:
http://www.chsd.us/ under "Community".
Mr.DeWolf plans on
continuing to use the software tools with students in my future astronomy
classes and hope to have additional students interested in pursuing
independent research projects next fall. There is a possibility that he
will get enough enrollment in their Project-Based Science course that this
could be a source of additional student projects as well.
October-December 2008
Mr. DeWolf did a 45 min session on his involvement in the Spitzer program, at the MESTA conference on Oct 4th. It included a PowerPoint overview of what he and his students are doing in the Spitzer program. He also showed one of the activities from the SOFIA Active Astronomy lessons - sensing infrared light with solar cell detector and digital cameras. In addition, he put together an activity where teachers and students built a light detector with a jumbo LED and digital multimeter. Teachers explored the different voltages produced by different wavelengths. They also were able to detect light from a remote with the sensor when an infrared LED from the SOFIA kit was used in the sensor.
Mr. DeWolf has created a wiki site to help teachers incorporate infrared astronomy topics in their classrooms.
http://spitzer-science-at-chhs.wikispaces.com/
July-September 2008
Since our trip to SSC last summer, we have added one new "official" member to our research team. Others from my 1st trimester astronomy course are involved as well as we begin our unit on light and telescopes. Also, the summer issue of the Michigan Earth Scientist - the journal of the Michigan Earth Science Teachers Association - featured an article about our experiences while in Pasadena.
We are continuing to work on analysis of data from our 2nd dark nebula - L981. Data became available in July. We meet once a week after school and have had interested students pop in from after school practices check out what's going on. Possibly they'll become the start of a continuing after school program in astronomy here in our district.
On October 4th I will be presenting my first workshop on infrared astronomy at the Michigan Earth Science Teachers Association Fall Conference in Hudsonville, MI. Plans are in the works through o the Mecosta-Osceola Intermediate School District to start a series of astronomy related workshops for teachers beginning in early November.
Our students are excited about coming to the AAS meeting in January and sharing their results along with the other students and teachers who have been involved in this project. They really liked seeing their names under the author heading for our abstract.
January-June 2008
Since I started with the Spitzer Teachers Research program last January, I
have added little thus far with classroom activities. We have been doing
some of the lessons from Active Astronomy ever since I field- tested some
of them for SOFIA some years back. We use these mostly in our freshmen
level Earth & Space Science course, but a few are used in the upper
level Astronomy course as well. I have used district and personal funds to
increase the number of kits to do these activities to 10. I plan on having
these used not just in our classrooms at Chippewa Hills, but also for PD
within our regional Intermediate School District and at sessions I present
at conferences, starting with the Michigan Earth Science Teachers Annual
Conference in early October. I have yet to schedule time for workshops
within our ISD but plan to do so this summer.
Students have
used Spot and Leopard to both look at Lynds Dark Nebulae with high visual
opacity and to see what ones had been previously imaged by Spitzer. This
helped find targets for our research project, ultimately leading to
bringing 2 students out to the SSC back in early June. Some of my students
took it a bit further and used available data to do 3 color images of
various targets.
I should have at least one section of
Astronomy in the upcoming school year as well as a new after school
Astronomy Club. These students will continue to assist with our ongoing
research - especially in the after school program.
When we get
back to school in September, I plan on getting the local paper to do an
article on our two students involvement in the research project and
their trip out to the SSC in June. I hope that this will create additional
interest in astronomy, and Spitzer, and get more students to become
involved in our new after school club.
Later in the summer,
when the next set of data is available from LDN 981, I will be able to
have one of my students work on it with me - and some of the campers in my
astronomy class at Camp Watonka, in Hawley, PA.
So far, I have
learned a little about how to use Terminal with my MacBook that helps set
up our mosaics for photometry work with APT. This is probably the biggest
plus to meeting with everyone at the SSC - learning how to use the various
pieces of software. I'm pretty confident that I can apply what I learned
to help my students work through the next data.
I've been
involved with so many different projects and programs outside of my
regular classroom instruction duties that I am not really sure that our
superintendent, school board, or public in general fully understand what
opportunities are now available to students at our high school. One of my
major goals for the fall is to do a lot of promotion of Spitzer. RBSE,
GLOBE, etc. in an attempt to build our new after school program, as well
as get more students interested in taking our full range of Earth and
Space elective courses - and the opportunity to do research!
Jeff Adkins
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John Blackwell
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Jacqueline Barge
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Christopher Border
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Kareen Borders
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Robert Bonadurer
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Merrill Butler
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Lauren Chapple
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Joseph Childers
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Howard Chun
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Wendy Curtis
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Richard DeCoster
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Stacy DeVeau
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Harlan Devore
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Cris DeWolf
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Velvet Dowdy
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Thomas Doyle
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Dean Drumheller
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Debbie Edwards
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Mike Ford
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Debbie French
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John Gibbs
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Peter Guastella
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Rosa Hemphill
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Ardis Herrold
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Vivian Hoette
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Chelen Johnson
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Virginia Jones
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Adam Keeton
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Susan Kelly
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Marcella Linahan
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Thomas Loughran
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Carolyn Mallory
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Anthony Maranto
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Christoper Martin
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Kevin McCarron
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Matthew McCutcheon
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David McDonald
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Shefali Mehta
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Cindy Melton
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Kate Meredith
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Lauren Novatne
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Kathryn O'Connor
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Caroline Odden
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Jeffrey Paradis
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Vincent Pereira
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Helen Petach
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Peggy Piper
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Peter Pitman
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Elizabeth Ramseyer
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Steve Rapp
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Theresa Roelofsen Moody
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Denise Rothrock
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Diane Sartore
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John Schaefers
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Sally Seebode
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Babs Sepulveda
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Timothy Spuck
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Darryl Stanford
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Linda Stefaniak
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Dwight Taylor
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Jennifer Tetler
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Beth Thomas
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Cynthia Weehler
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Lynne Zielinski
