Published: April 15, 2009
Since the AAS, Ms. Zielinski has asked her two students to follow up with a summary of the findings associated with the Z Cha data. She anticipates a final report from these students by the end of May. They will be graduating this year, so Ms. Zielinski will begin work with a new group of students in the fall. Her plan is to work this summer on further developing some of the classroom activities worked on for the project. She plans on spending some time this summer going through some of the new materials gained from the AAS conference and seeing whether she can adapt any for her own classroom use. Ms. Zielinski has hand-picked some of her better and more interested students to learn about the Spitzer project and to do research and teach about it. She also wants to look through the Spitzer website for more teacher projects that she can utilize. Ms. Zielinski is also interested in learning more about the possibility of working with some of the Spitzer "warm mission" scientists on future Spitzer projects.
Ms. Zielinski reports that the scope of the Spitzer project has taught her students to be better researchers, writers, and speakers. The positive impact was definitely worth the hard work. Her two Spitzer students are now concentrating on preparing for college. Ms. Zielinski has asked the students to present to her a final report on their project before they graduate and she is planning on submitting it to the RBSE Journal for publication. The students have been featured and recognized for their accomplishments with the Spitzer program. They were interviewed by the school newspaper and stories appeared on the school website.