Chelen Johnson
Finding Infrared Excess in the SEIP (fIRes) will be looking for stars with infrared excesses in the Spitzer Enhanced Imaging Products catalog.
We had a staff meeting this morning and the kids presented our research and shared our experiences to the entire staff. They did an outstanding job and many of our teachers have commented to me how impressed they were by what they did. One of our teachers (and MIT grad) asked a couple of good questions and commented afterward to me he was impressed that they could explain the answer (noting that they were not just number crunching).
I was also surprised [after the summer visit] not to be more tired. Don't get me wrong, I certainly took a five hour nap on Saturday after coming home on the red-eye from LA, but overall the week left me invigorated rather than exhausted.
NITARP totally changed the way I teach, and I am grateful. Spreadsheets and data infuse my lessons. I assign kids to create spreadsheets to demonstrate that they really know how to, for example, apply trig to a problem, and then use those spreadsheets to use their solution to answer a question.