Published: October 7, 2019
Mr. Black writes:
I attended a Research Teacher Conference in Washington, D.C. last weekend (Sept. 27-29) sponsored by
Regeneron and the Socity for Science and the Public, who run the Science Talent Search and ISEF. We set
up an informal session to share teacher research opportunities, and I shared the NITARP program with
about 15 teachers in the session and explained how it worked and how to apply. We added it to a
Pinterest board to share with all 200 conference attendees.I presented two sessions at the conference, one on using Big Data in for student science fair projects,
the other on engineering projects for science fairs.This last summer I was chosen for the Teacher Innovator Institute at the National Air and Space Museum
in D.C. and spent two weeks learning about informal science education and helping out with the
celebration for the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission. I shared NITARP with several of the
attendees. I will be returning for the Institute for the next two summers.I have just begun a doctoral program in Innovation and Education Reform at the University of Northern
Colorado. It is an online program and I expect to finish that in four years. I am narrowing down my
list of dissertation topics and taking the obligatory graduate statistics and research methodologies
courses.