• NASA
  • IPAC

Summer "Visit" - 2020 - Spider Team

Our regular summer visit to Caltech was hijacked by COVID-19. So we did an online work week instead -- 4 days when all the participants on the team come together to work intensively on the data. Reload to see a different set of quotes.

The Spider Team worked June 22-25, 2020. The 4 core team educators attended, plus 12 students.


Quotes

  • I was most surprised at how well the students picked up the material. I can only speak with great deal about my own students, but overall the amount of silence that was present leading up to the conference convinced me that we’d have to spend conference time reinforcing the underlying science. Great job for [the] educators in getting our students ready to go.
  • The summer NITARP experience reaffirmed the incredible power of collaborative construction of knowledge and understanding. Astronomers have so much data available to them that it is overwhelming if not processed in small doses. [...] I have always known about the collaborative nature of science, but this experience has really made it clear how powerful it is as a check on erroneous understanding, poorly thought out processes, and simple error in work product. [...] I now see how much better the quality of the work is because of the collaborative process.
  • [student:] This experience changed the way I thought about astronomy research because I did not think it was as digital as it is. I did not think it was going to be as much computer work.
  • [student:] The best part was getting to collaborate with intelligent people on a project that will be relevant to actual science.
  • [the qualities of an astronomer are:] Math and patience. Maybe not in that order.

Summer "Visit" - 2020 - Spider Team