"Research is what I'm doing when I don't know what I'm doing.": January 8- NITARP and AAS, day 3

Hello again from AAS in Long Beach! If you've just stumbled across my blog, welcome! I'm a teacher, so there's not a whole lot of science here, but if you're interested in a teacher point of view of the AAS, then I think you're in the right place.

Check out our news release for NITARP… I’m in there! http://www.spitzer.caltech.edu/news/1493-ssc2013-03-Have-You-Practiced-Your-Piano-and-Done-Your-NASA-Research

Started the morning with a plenary talk about exoplanets and Kepler (the telescope, not the man). One of the best things about the talk was it was presented by a girl! Yay for ladies in science! Natalie Batalha from NASA Ames gave the talk and not only was she great, the stuff we saw was great. Who doesn't love planets outside the solar system!? Yesterday the Kepler team announced that there were 461 new planet candidates and a bunch of the ones they’re finding are getting smaller and more Earth-ish in size. That’s just cool. She showed some of graphs at the beginning that illustrated the number of exoplanets found over time, and when she added the Kepler data (from just the past few years) everyone in the room literally applauded. (yes, I believe my life is better because I was in a room full of people who clapped for a graph of planets.)

nothing like Kepler science in the morning!

planets, planets everywhere!

I hung out in the Grand Ballroom for a few more minutes to see 2 people receive awards. The first was C. Megan Urry (yes, another woman astronomer!) who won the prize because of her work to involve women in astronomy. The second was Donald McCarthy, who won the AAS education prize for doing years of work at the University of Arizona’s astronomy camp and mentoring students, some who now have PhDs in astronomy.

From there I went to a session on Innovations in Teaching, Learning and Mentoring. I’m not sure that any of the speakers I heard had very innovative ideas… cool, but not quite innovative. The first was a woman involved with the world wide telescope program. I learned about the program this summer at the Space Telescope Science Institute and while it is very cool, her talk was mostly about integrating technology with what is already done in class, which in almost every case I've seen, increases learning for students. If you haven't seen the WWT program, you should check it out… it really is neat. http://www.worldwidetelescope.org/Home.aspx . The next speaker talked about his flipped classroom. They only met once a week face to face; students did work, posted it online, and responded to others… the usual. He said it worked really well, but I would venture to say that just about anything works well when your class is only 18 students who are all in an honors college program. Next is a program I think I may want to look into, a sort of citizen science thing where students can hunt for asteroids. Again, very cool, but citizen science isn't really something new. This is the website: http://iasc.hsutx.edu/index.htm , if you’d like to look into it too! The last talk I heard before sneaking out of the session (there were 3 more, but I had to get to the education event…) was on how what we’re doing in education isn't really working for the students. For the majority of students for the majority of the time, I agree. The presenter talked a bit about her nephew learning but not learning according to a test. I took short notes at just about every session I went to, and something she said hit me enough to write it down word for word. “Everything I think I know might be wrong. So what is possible?” So her program involves research on how students learn and understand astronomy. Their intention is to sort of reboot everything when it comes to astronomy education. Are you interested in participating? I think I am. It’s just getting started, and you can be part of it! go here: http://www.caperteam.com/iSTAR.html and click on the registration link.

At around 11:30, we headed to an event for teachers and students (even though I didn't have any students with me). The woman in charge put us all into groups with a mix of teachers and students, color coded us, and got us all in a room and seated within about 10 minutes. I would say there were close to 200 people there and I would be willing to bet money that she was, at some point, a teacher. The welcome speech was given by none other than Bobak Ferdowsi, Mars Science Lab engineer/Mohawk guy (but based on his face during his introduction, clearly he does not enjoy being called that or the attention). He shared a bunch of photos from Curiosity with us and a really cool video of the landing night, which I hadn't actually seen yet. http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/video/index.php?id=1116 He said each time he watches it, he still gets nervous. Honestly, watching it made me nervous too.

Flashback Photo: found this photo on my iPod of that night. I was glued to my TV at 1am eastern, just like - I assume - most of you reading this.

TV for NASAtv, computer for Twitter and Eyes on the Solar System

He showed some other cool photos, most of which I had seen already, then took some questions from the students, all of which were really good. Most kids really do think science is cool and I wish I knew the point when most of them stop thinking that. Once everyone started leaving, he very graciously took photos with everyone who wanted one, and signed an autograph or two.

We (the teachers and students) ended up in the exhibit hall to visit booths for 15 minute sessions, and I’m not going to lie, the scientists pulled out ALL the stops to get the kids doing exciting things, asking good questions, answering good questions, and doing hands on activities. So, if you’re one of the people who were in booths 2-9 today, kudos. As a teacher, I know that if they were my students, they would have learned a ton and loved learning it all at the same time. You can’t ask for anything better than that. Some of the booths were ones I had already visited, but a few of the people remembered me, which was cool.

students learning about NuSTAR and Rocks from space with some NASA scientists!

three NITARP teachers playing with the IR camera at the IPAC booth! (I’m on the left!)

Throughout the day, two announcements were made that I thought were really cool: an asteroid belt around Vega, and that a brown dwarf may have an atmosphere! You can find them both on the NASA facebook page, if you’d like to know more. www.facebook.com/NASA .

The whirlwind of AAS continued when I met with my team (did I mention they’re awesome?) one last time before some of us start leaving tomorrow. We went through the process of getting light curves again and I feel much better about it now. We also have homework to check out light curves in other research tomorrow, complete the process for four stars and be on a conference call on January 21st to talk about our results. (I’m starting to feel like I’m doing real science for the first time in a long time. It’s so cool.)

The last thing I did for the day was wander around to check out the posters of some of the NITARP teams from last year. I only looked at two posters on Monday – one from one of the scientists I’m working with, he loves Pluto and got a really good photo of it; and one from the scientist who helps run the NITARP program, she did research on the disks around F type stars and just like all good science, now has more questions about what’s really going on. The posters today on Education were my favorite. You can check out all of them here: http://coolcosmos.ipac.caltech.edu/cosmic_classroom/teacher_research/aas/ .

There was a great top 10 list on the “how do astronomers know that?” poster. The students there did a great job of explaining to me what it was like to really collaborate as scientists and how helpful it was to work as a team to learn new things. The inquiry poster was cool, if for no other reason than because it helped me to remember that I’m really doing the right thing when I give my students time to play and figure things out for themselves. Another education one that was extremely interesting to me because it involved middle AND high school students. The students I spoke with were clearly younger but still knew just as much and were just as well spoken as any of the other students I talked to. They worked with a huge group of students and teachers to study galactic nuclei. I also checked out a poster that dove into students having a hard time understanding the relationships in telescopes between aperture and resolution, which is something I struggle to teach as well. Like any good education data, there was a pre and post test that showed increased understanding after targeted hands on interventions. A few of the other posters I saw had research done by Spitzer and Chandra, described an aperture tool that can be used for doing astronomy research, searched for Young Stellar Objects with WISE data, and analyzed SOFIA data on a planetary nebula.

It was clearly another long day, so I headed back to the hotel after checking out the posters. I got a bunch of cool NASA swag, and I’m rested and ready for tomorrow. My plans for tomorrow are: 1. find posters with light curves 2. go to a town hall 3.meet some more new people and 4.enjoy my last day here!

tweets from the day... as always, start at the bottom :)

"Research is what I'm doing when I don't know what I'm doing."

Wednesday, January 9, 2013

January 8- NITARP and AAS, day 3

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