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Summer 2010
CG4 Team
The CG4 team came to visit in June 2010. The core team educators plus
6 students attended, including one visually impaired and two hearing
impaired students; three additional educators attended as support for
these three students (L. Gamble, C. Gartner, J. VanDerMolen). Two
IPAC staff members also participated: R. Laher and M. Legassie. The
scientist mentor was Luisa Rebull.
Core teachers:
Vivian Hoette,
Chelen Johnson (mentor teacher),
Carolyn Mallory,
Kevin McCarron.
J. VanDerMolen signs to hearing impaired student A. M. during the
discussion of instrumental artifacts in IRAC images.
Most of the team in the JPL museum during the JPL tour.
Selected quotes from participants:
- in response to "most important thing you learned":
- I always thought just from programs on tv and in the
classroom that astronomy was more or less completely
figured out. Learning that it isn't is pretty exciting.
- in response to "What was the best thing about the trip?"
- Personally, I felt like being at Caltech was like "See you
can be in the thick of this!" kind of feeling of discovering new things.
- Watching hearing-impaired students guide their interpreters
through their description of a newly discovered APT bug with the
software developer Russ Laher was fascinating. They were able to
accurately describe what they perceived was a problem and he was
able to correct it on the spot.
- More:
- Of the many astronomy programs I've been associated with over
the years, the NITARP program is the most authentic. Working
side by side with Luisa, Russ and Varoujan allows teachers and
students to learn what is "real astronomy" is. Many science
teachers begin the year with a discussion of the "scientific
method." Our group modeled just that -- Starting with a problem,
researching background papers, submitting a research proposal,
analyzing authentic data, and drawing conclusions models the
scientific process in real life.
LDM (AGN) Team
The LDM team came to visit in July 2010. The core team educators plus
11 students attended. One IPAC staff member also participated: M.
Abajian. The scientist mentor was Varoujan Gorjian.
Core teachers:
Kate Meredith,
Helen Petach,
Elizabeth Ramseyer,
Timothy Spuck (mentor teacher).
Students working away on AGN measurements.
I think we tired them out....
Selected quotes from participants:
- in response to "most important thing you learned":
- You have to double check everything you do always, because one
slight mistake can throw everything off.
- It was really important that we discovered for ourselves the
photometry problems associated with measuring an AGN. It was very
important to see all the information related to our project come
together in a continuous package.
- Astronomy is an art. There is no obviously right answer, as in
math, but instead more and less logical interpretations. Robots can
therefore only work as data collectors, not data analyzers, for
astronomy.
- In response to "most surprising thing":
- [student] the stuff we are doing was not as hard as I was
anticipating.
- [student] Everyone (students, teachers, scientists) seemed to
enjoy the work and therefore it didn't seem to be work.
- I was very surprised to discover the relative difficulty one
deals with when trying to compare data from different
telescopes/missions, each of which seem to have its own independent
database using different software.
- In response to "best thing about the trip":
- working as a group and sharing the excitement of science.
- In response to "what is real astronomy"?
- Real astronomy to me is working in a team. [...]But very
important for "real astronomy" is that there is no ending.
- [student] I figured we would simply insert the image and the
computer would calculate all of our numbers for us. But we had to
adjust many settings and use our expertise to find magnitudes for the
galaxies
SED Team
The SED team came to visit in August 2010. The core team educators
attended. The scientist mentors were Steve Howell and Don Hoard.
Core teachers:
Dean Drumheller,
Sally Seebode (mentor teacher),
Darryl Stanford.
Sally explaining an SED.
Darryl and Steve.
Team at JPL.
Selected quotes from participants:
- In response to `what is real astronomy':
- "Real astronomy" involves throwing away the textbook answers and
delving into the theory to understand why our preconceived ideas were
not working.
- "Real astronomy" seems to be a lot of number manipulation.
Students have to have a good grasp of the big picture to get into
astronomy research or they get lost in the details.
Variable Stars Team
The Variable Stars team came to visit in August 2010. The core team educators
attended, plus 6 students. The scientist mentors were Steve Howell and Don Hoard.
Core teachers:
Richard DeCoster,
Peggy Piper,
Beth Thomas (mentor teacher).
Team at Caltech.
Team at JPL.
Selected quotes from participants:
- [I was surprised] that the students, given an interesting task,
could stay on task for hours at a time. When I mentioned to parents
following the trip that I was amazed at how well the students stayed
on task, A. interjected that it wasn't so hard, since they were
being challenged to use new tools to reach achievable results.
- [student] This was surely one of the best experiences I had ever been on
- I was very impressed at how quickly our three teams turned into one.
Our students worked together seamlessly from the beginning of our
trip. Each student brought their strengths to the table and shared
them willingly. Each group went through frustrations, made mistakes,
had to backtrack, got angry, but still came through in the end with
good solid data. When expectations were raised, the team rose to reach
them. Teachers and astronomers invested fully in all students and
students responded by calling on any team member for help when needed.
- What I considered to be the "real" science that came out of this visit
was how we needed to treat the data. Students are used to doing
"canned" laboratory assignments and have the misconception that all
data is "good". In class when I ask students to consider an errant
data point, they are apt to respond "but that's the data, I have to
use it". Its difficult to convey the idea that not all data is good
data, and if there is reason, data points can and should be
disregarded. We found data points that were erroneous, whether because
they were cosmic rays, they came from pixels located near the edge of
the detector, or we had transferred information incorrectly. In each
of these situations, we logically considered the data and had reason
to include or exclude data points. We also double checked any
suspicious or inconsistent data until we were convinced that we were
working with reliable numbers.
- [student] There was some frustration today, but we all pushed past it
and got the majority of the work done.
- [student] That was one of the best experiences in my life. I am truly
thankful that I was given the chance to go on this trip and to learn
more about this project and all of its subjects.
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