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AAS - 2016

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 2015 and 2016 NITARP teams attended the 2016 January AAS meeting in Kissimmee, FL. The 2015 class was presenting results and the 2016 class was starting up. We had many alumni raise money to come back as well. We sent about 50 people to the AAS and had a grand time. Please see the special article on NITARP at the AAS, and a special article on NITARP alumni at the AAS. All of the posters we presented are here:

Quotes

  • This experience has reinforced to me the importance of learning science by doing science. I have slowly been altering my curricula to provide students with more authentic research experience.
  • [student:] I didn’t expect for other astronomers to be so interested in our poster and the things we were doing. I feel like they were as surprised as we were that we could present such work.
  • [student: Astronomy] is much more [about] teamwork [than I thought.]
  • [student:] It’s very rare that high school students actually get the chance to experience something this real in science class. All the labs have predetermined right answers, which is great for teaching content, but real science doesn’t have a “right” answer, it’s about finding new answers, challenging the old answers. Science isn’t about being “right” it’s more about “what if?” and “I wonder”. It’s new to not have to worry if you have the “right” answer.
  • [student:] I used to think astronomy included looking through telescopes and gathering data each time, but this project showed me that a lot of astronomy is just using existing data. Also I realized there’s a lot more graphing in astronomy than I expected.

Related Teams

AAS - 2016