• NASA
  • IPAC

Summer Visit - BINAP 2025

NITARP has been running in one form or another since 2005, and at this point nearly 150 educators have been through the program. For a third year, a few of the alumni raised their own money to come out to visit us at Caltech-IPAC in late June- early July 2025, with many more participating remotely. This group of alumni is continuing to work towards taking elements of a 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 year, the group embarked upon making lessons centered on extragalactic activities. The plan is to continue to develop these materials (and add more!) 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.


Quotes

  • After the summer visit, I went back to school and changed everything about the way I taught. It completely transformed the way that I taught in the classroom on a regular basis. Everything became much more open ended and inquiry based.
  • Every time I come back from NITARP, I end up teaching something differently, with a new perspective. And then a year later I find out that my school district is catching up. So NITARP puts me two years ahead of everybody else in my neighborhood. It's really been fun that way.
  • What this program does for me and what it has done for my students, is that it keeps us current and keeps us excited about this field.
  • NITARP restores my soul every summer, and it puts my pedagogy ahead, and that's really good for my kids, because by the time it becomes canon in my district, a lot of kids have already seen it.
  • I haven't had a student that I brought through the program, or through any of my lessons, that hasn't benefited in some way and isn't using some of those skills that we've learned in the process.

Summer Visit - BINAP 2025