NITARP has been running in one form or another since 2005, and at this point nearly 140 educators have been through the program. A few of the alumni raised their own money to come out to visit us at Caltech-IPAC in July 2023. This core group of alumni is working towards taking a full NITARP project, breaking it into “bite-sized pieces”, and making materials centered around those pieces that can be pulled out and used by NITARP alumni whether they have a semester long class in which they can only afford a few class periods to do something NITARP-related, or they have a year-long research class in which they can model more of the NITARP experience. This core group made considerable progress on this effort and has now begun working with a larger group of nearly two dozen alumni to try to pilot some of these modules. The plan is to continue to develop materials that can be shared initially within the NITARP alumni community and eventually to educators world-wide looking to incorporate real astronomy data from IPAC into their classrooms.
