Oil City High School, Oil City, Pennsylvania
General Public: Amateur, 9, 10, 11, 12
Mr. Spuck was part of the original Spitzer Space Telescope Research Program for Teachers and Students, and has been with the program pretty much ever since.
Both Mr. Spuck and Ms. Meredith are part of Innovators Developing Accessible Tools for Astronomy (IDATA), which has just been funded by the NSF. They are working with a user centered design process to create astronomical data processing software that is accessible to blind and low vision students and scientists. See http://yerkesoutreach.org/IDATA
Mr. Spuck edited (and wrote a chapter in) a new book, "Einstein Fellows: Best Practices in STEM Education". It can be ordered from Amazon.
TIm Spuck and Ardis Herrold shared their experience and advice in a NITARP tutorial on getting more media coverage for your activities.
Mr. Spuck was selected as a PolarTREC teacher and visited Greenland in June and will visit Antarctica in December! Way to go!
Mr. Spuck worked with the folks at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars to put on a Panel Discussion titled "Scientist Partnerships with K-12 Education: Priming the STEM Pipeline." The panel featured science educators (including him) and research scientists, and focused on successful teacher-scientist partnerships including NITARP and Spitzer.
Mr. Spuck led a discussion at ASTROBLAST 2011 (an annual star party in NW Pennsylvania) titled "Astronomy Software and Online Resources Round Table Discussion." During the discussion, he showed participants how to use the Spitzer data archive to access images.
We are officially announcing our 2011 class! Here they all are.
Mr. Spuck is starting as an Albert Einstein Distinguished Educator Fellow at the National Science Foundation for 2010-2011.
Mr. Spuck's student Inga Saathoff went to the ISEF and won a $50,000 scholarship to the Florida Institute of Technology. Congratulations Inga!!
Mr. Spuck took two posters to the Miami AAS : Spuck et al., Engaging Students in Authentic Astronomy Research Experiences, and Saathoff, Spuck, and Rebull, Identifying TTauri Stars Using Small-Scale Optical Telescopes.
Mr. Spuck had four students participate in the Pittsburgh Regional Science and Engineering Fair, and one, Inga Saathoff, was selected to go to the International Science and Engineering Fair in May. Congratulations Inga! Here is an article from their local newspaper about the event.
The 2010 class has been selected!
Tim Spuck has written a document that presents a summary of the impact of this program between 2005 and 2009.
Mr. Spuck's student, Jennifer Butchart, took second place at the International Science and Engineering Fair in Reno, NV! Congratulations Jennifer!
Mr. Spuck presented a presentation on his Spitzer project to the general public at the Astronomy Day Event at the Carnegie Science Center in Pittsburgh. He is working on selecting two new students that will accompany him to his group's work session at the Spitzer Science Center this summer.
Mr. Spuck worked with Linda Vu from the Spitzer Science Center on a press release that will be distributed throughout our local region here in NW Pennsylvania. He also worked with the rest of the IC 2118 Research team to coordinate our summer 2006 visit to the Spitzer Science Center for data analysis and curriculum development. He is working with his student Brittany to prepare her graduation project presentation on the Spitzer Space Telescope and research on IC 2118.
Mr. Spuck presented his group's posters at the American Astronomical Society meeting in Washington, DC. He met with scientists from the National Radio Astronomy Observatory to discuss possible follow-up radio observations of the region, and the possibility of using PSI Plot to generate Spectral Energy Distributions. In conjunction with other team members, Mr. Spuck prepared the final draft of the educational component for the group's phase two follow-up proposal.
[...]These new discoveries will force scientist back to the drawing board when it comes to solar system formation and evolution models. To me that's neat. It demonstrates that just because something seems to make sense in science, that doesn't necessarily make it the case. Our models have to match the evidence we have, and that is why it is so very important that we must never stop the collection of new evidence ... we can never sit back and be comfortable in our practice of science.
It was very special to be in the room when the announcement of planet Kepler 10b (an estimated 1.4 X the size of the Earth) was discovered. I turned to my student Inga and asked, "How does it feel to be one of the first people on planet Earth to know about this discovery?" She replied, "I never thought of it like that ... it's pretty cool."