Chelen Johnson
The Cyclops AGN team will be continuing the work of last year's AGNatha team, using WISE data to identify anomalous AGN in Gaia.
Our lead astronomer, Luisa Rebull, has a very energetic style and pushes her team to the limits. Our group of teachers put in many hours each week for a full year to learn the topic or skill at hand followed by a weekly teleconference. The pressure was on and I loved it!
My NITARP experience has made me rethink my entire approach to science education. Many of my students expect me to do the work and pretty much hand it to them all wrapped up and neat. Science education must involve a great deal of discovery by the student and not a string of topics with definitions.
So many of us science teachers do labs where the end is known (which is sometimes necessary to make sure they fit in a class period and that the students understand the concept we're trying to learn) but that's not really science.