• 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

  • [student:] I feel like real astronomy is working with real data from the real world that no one has looked at or touched before. Throughout this entire process, I've felt like I have done real astronomy and have been making new, exciting discoveries that will contribute to humanity's understanding of the cosmos no matter how small that may be.
  • The BEST thing about the week was seeing everyone rise to the opportunity to do this over Zoom. Seriously. There was a possibility of being burned out by “yet another Zoom”, or distractions from being at your home. Yet, we appeared to have the full buy in and attention for the entire time. I’m really proud of what we accomplished.
  • The summer meeting was the essential moment that transformed all of the separate pieces of our knowledge and skill building into an integrated and meaningful process for carrying out our research project. Seeing this all come together over these precious days together, even with the challenges and limitations of a Zoom environment, felt awesome. The final day of independent discussion without Luisa was a critical element in producing this transformation. We HAD to figure out our process. This is as authentic of an “assessment” as we could have regarding the week's progress.
  • Working together is a must. Multiple eyes, opinions, strengths, needs, etc were all on display. Students stepped up at different times in different ways.
  • 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.

Summer "Visit" - 2020 - Spider Team