AAS - 2024

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 2023 and 2024 NITARP teams attended the 2024 January AAS meeting in New Orleans, LA. The 2023 class was presenting results and the 2024 class was starting up. We had alumni raise money to come back as well. We sent about 50 people to the AAS and had a grand time. Please see the press release on NITARP from the AAS, and the special online article about NITARP at the AAS. All of the posters we presented are here. (In addition to the iPoster sessions as listed here, the physical versions of the 2023 teams' posters were up at the IPAC booth all day Tuesday.)

2023 teams:

171.01 McKay et al., Young stellar students and objects: Illuminating astronomy research for students and teachers (Monday 5:30-6:30)
171.02 Hickey et al., Building Confidence and Combating Imposter Syndrome Through Student-Educator Research Projects (Monday 5:30-6:30)
171.05 Garcia et al., Reaching for the Stars: How Research Experience Has Expanded the Scope of a High School Astronomy Club (Monday 5:30-6:30)
181.01 Kuper et al., Looking for Young Stellar Objects in Obscure Sharpless Regions (Monday 5:30-6:30)
201.05 Carpenetti et al., Building a Catalog of AGN with Erroneous Parallaxes Using WISE and Gaia (Tuesday 9-10)

Alumni:

167.01 Sperling et al., Student-Led High Altitude Ballooning into Solar Eclipses (Monday 5:30-6:30)
171.03 Rebull et al., NITARP Lesson Plans: Bite-Size Pieces of Authentic Science Research Experiences (Monday 5:30-6:30)
171.06 Newland, Using Google Colab to Teach Hubble-Lemaitre's Law with BOSS Data (Monday 5:30-6:30)
176.02 Rebull et al., Young Stellar Object Candidates in IC 417 (Monday 5:30-6:30)
203.03 Wojciak et al., Exploring Color-Magnitude Relationships Among Quasars with z between 1.5-1.75 (Tuesday 9-10)
458.21 Jones & Rutherford, The Three-Dimensional Structure of IC 2391 (Thursday 1-2)

Quotes

The reason that schools offer business, agriculture, engineering, etc. courses is to give students a sense of what that career is like. NITARP is one of the few opportunities that students get to experience what a “career” in science is like. For teachers, NITARP can showcase and teach the skills that are necessary for success in a scientific career and allow teachers to better educate their students on what that career path is like.
Giving highly motivated teachers a community to build their skills is a critical component of professional development that isn’t always an option, especially in small districts or specialized areas. NITARP gives an opportunity for teachers from smaller or more rural communities to find colleagues to collaborate and provide opportunities for students they would not otherwise have.
[Now, in my classroom,] I really push my students to collect authentic data and we have been practicing our presentation skills a lot more. I also use the charts and graphs during our astronomy unit and talk about the experience with my students.
None of the work we did with NITARP felt like busy work.
I hope to shift more from the “survive” to “thrive” mode in implementing what I’ve learned and experienced in NITARP. While “authentic scientific research” may not always be practical in my 41-minute high school science classroom, I still want to bring along and model the same wonder, curiosity, optimism for self-improvement and self-actualization, and sense of community that I experienced in NITARP.

AAS - 2024

Quotes

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