Education and Public Outreach
Education and Public Outreach
Under the auspices of a three year NASA E/PO grant, we are creating a series of web lessons to educate middle school students in gamma-ray and X-ray astronomy. We also had a workshop to share the required knowledge with Chicago Public school teachers, who then helped to design and write the lessons, which are then rendered on the web so that students can begin to use them. As part of this, I gave a lecture on X-ray astronomy to Chicago School teachers, which ended up lasting the better part of 4 hours.
The multi-wavelength astronomy site can be viewed here.
About once a month from Aug 2008 to Feb 2011, I gave a public lecture in the Adler Planetarium Science Visualization lab, as part of the Astro Conversations series organized jointly between University of Chicago and Adler. The SVL consists of a tiled wall, a geo wall, and various other cool computer set-ups that allow for a thrilling and interactive visual display (as in photo above). This is a good way to reach out to the general public on topics of current astronomical interest.
I was a part of the NASA All-Stars grant project. As part of my involvement with this, I gave an overview talk on X-ray astronomy to students and teachers from Chicago Public Schools in July 2013 (pictures above were taken by students with the ipad minis that they received as part of the program). I was also involved in other activities.
If you want to see what the students and teachers thought of the summer program that was organized, as well as my talk in particular, you can read their blogs here.
If you want to see photos I took on the last day of the program, you can view them here.
With support from an STScI Public Outreach grant, I worked with Don York, Julia Brazas, Christie Thomas, Steven Lane and others to help create a web site for Chicago Public School students that helps them understand the formation of the elements in the periodic table, and how they came to be. We designed and laid out the site and discussed the various animations and simulations, which were then brilliantly rendered by Steven. You can see the end result here:
http://www.chicagowebdocent.org/modules/interactives/misc/originsoftheelements.swf
Any comments/suggestions are of course appreciated.