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Summer Visit - 2018 - Cosmic DIRt

The summer visit to Caltech is 4 days long and is the only time during the year of work when all the participants on the team come together in person to work intensively on the data. Generally, each educator may bring up to two students to the summer visit that are paid for by NITARP, and they may raise funds to bring two more. The teams work at Caltech; the summer visit typically includes a half-day tour of JPL, which is a favorite site for group photos. Reload to see a different set of quotes.

The Cosmic dIRt team came to visit in June 2018. The core team educators attended, plus 10 students.

Quotes

  • [student:] The most interesting thing we did on the trip was visit JPL. I was amazed by how much was being done there and I felt like it really confirmed that I wanted to work at a place like that.
  • For teachers it can be hard to let yourself not know things in front of the kids but it is even harder to let yourself be wrong; accept that this is part of the experience.
  • I feel like my kids developed a much deeper understanding of the subject material by having the discussions we did and practicing with the group. It was really cool to see how the kids all came and worked together on this project. I think that bonding experience will help make the research easier since we are more comfortable with each other, it will be easier to share ideas and speak up when something doesn't feel quite right.
  • [...] the community of teachers has been an unexpected and positive outcome of this program. I text the other physics teachers all the time to be like "hey, how do you teach this?" and then we chat about it. We also chat about our lives and things non NITARP/ teaching. Seeing these teachers in person was like a visit with my favorite science pen pals who live parallel lives in other states.
  • “Real astronomy” is like detective work. It requires gathering the available evidence, integrating it, and following it where it leads.

Related Teams

Summer Visit - 2018 - Cosmic DIRt