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AAS - 2014

The Winter American Astronomical Society (AAS) meeting is the largest meeting of professional astronomers in the world. NITARP educators attend an AAS first to meet their team, then they go home and work remotely for much of the year, and then attend an AAS to present their results.  At any given AAS, then, we could have two NITARP classes attending - those finishing up, and those getting started. Reload to see a different set of quotes.

The 2013 and 2014 NITARP teams attended the 2014 January AAS meeting in National Harbor, MD (outside of Washington, DC). The 2013 class was presenting results and the 2014 class was starting up. We had a lot of alumni raise their own money to come back as well. We sent about 75 people to the AAS and had a grand time. Please see the special article on NITARP at the AAS. One of our participants, Peggy Piper, participated in a Congressional briefing on Thursday! All the posters we presented are linked from the team's pages below, except for HG-WELS and SIRXS, because they are the two new teams.

Quotes

  • Having scientists explain their research and bringing it down to my level was very interesting and I learned so much!
  • The idea that exposing teachers to authentic experiences doing real research has a positive trickle-down effect on science education as a whole I think is very well-founded. I know that as I grow in both my content understanding and my experiences with current research, I am better able to expose my students to experiences in which they (1) gain higher levels of data literacy, (2) gain a greater understanding of what astronomers actually do and how they conduct their research, and (3) learn about new science being done in astronomy.
  • [student:] I had not realized that there are numerous fields within astronomy pertaining not only to science and engineering, but history and art.
  • [student:] one thing that surprised me: the interest the people took in out research and us as students. Going in to the presentation, I was expecting to be ignored a majority of the time during our shift, but I was pleased when we actually talked to people a majority of the time. It was touching to me that people took the time out of their day to listen to us and give us tips as to how we could improve in the future in this research and as students.
  • [student:] this experience changed how I viewed astronomy. I always looked at astronomy big picture, but realize now that much of astronomy is numerical data analyzing.

Related Teams

AAS - 2014