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Summer Visit - 2013 - They Might Be Giants

The summer visit to Caltech is 3-4 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 "They Might Be Giants" team came to visit in August 2013. The core team educators attended, plus 6 students.

Quotes

  • I think my kids were surprised at how much fun [our astronomers] were. I think they had a stereotype of astronomer that definitely didn't match reality! :)
  • [student:] The importance of using significant digits in calculations was finally explained to me in a way that made it seem relevant and important.
  • [student:] I thought we would get to actually observe stars through a telescope, [...] I also did not expect so much time to be spend on the computer.
  • [student:] This trip got me even more excited about astronomy, and made me realize that the approaches to solve a problem/analyze data are similar everywhere.
  • The process of gathering and analyzing data was very important to help show my kids what real research is like. And since our data didn't come out nice and neat like some labs do, it really helped push my kids to think outside the box.

Related Teams

Summer Visit - 2013 - They Might Be Giants