NOAO Office of Public Affairs and Educational Outreach

National Association for Interpretation workshop report

I recently returned from an extensive certification workshop from the National Association for Interpretation, which taught attendees how to develop an interpretative master plan for an entire facility.

This workshop was an intense week-long program which broke the group down into five different teams that were dropped off and directed to take a critical look at a real-life visitor center.

The teams, made up of people from all over the US, came up with five very different interpretative master plans for this center, which were presented at the last day of the workshop. This interesting training will enable us to develop our own interpretative master plan for Kitt Peak, which will include major goals and objectives, the “message” we want visitors to leave with, and related issues such as the content of exhibits (inside and out), tours and mountain signage.

We’d be interested to hear about any recent efforts to develop a similar interpretive plan for an astronomy or space science facility.

Posted by Rich Fedele at 10:39 AM

From the 2006 NSTA Meeting in Anaheim

Part 2 - “The Return from NSTA”

Well, I made it back from the National Science Teachers Association meeting in Anaheim late on Saturday afternoon. I was so tired at the airport that I didn’t notice until the last minute that I could make an earlier flight, since LA traffic was light and the airport van arrived early. I made the earlier flight going standby, though my luggage did not.

Speaking of luggage, I had to take mine in to be repaired on Monday. It is a time-honored tradition to take home as many resources as possible from the NSTA exhibit floor to share with teachers back home, and my luggage suffered as usual. Now I have to figure out a way to get these materials out of my office and to the teachers that I collected them for. I already have two boxes of educational materials in my office from before the meeting to send to teachers in Chile and Singapore who are doing special astronomy programs.

The NSTA meeting ended well, with our last session (of five) addressing the Spitzer-TLRBSE teacher and student research program on Saturday. Three teachers who do research presented results from their projects and their work was very impressive. Our turnout was less than our other workshops, and our room for this presentation was a very large ballroom, for some reason. It turned out that we were competing with an Earth science “share-a-thon” and Bill Nye “The Science Guy,” as well as a conference trip to Disneyland.

I continue to be heartened and amazed by the durability and enthusiasm of the teachers we work with from across the country. The conference was a marathon, with meetings and lounge discussions running until close to midnight each night. We also met for dinner with our TLRBSE teachers who were at Kitt Peak last summer, and had a business meeting with them on Friday night. It was great to see them, and hear more about how their year is going.

For many of these teachers, our travel funding support enabled them to make this their first-ever NSTA meeting, even though most of them have taught for 15-20 years. This is like an astronomer working for 20 years before going to their first AAS meeting. The problem of teacher isolation, and lack of treatment as a professional or expert, is an important one for the teaching profession, and for teachers in how they view themselves.

The 2007 NSTA national meeting is in St. Louis in a year from now. However, proposals for sessions, workshops, and talks are due in a few days, leaving so little time to reflect on this year’s meeting before planning on presentations at the next one. This one-year gap between proposal and presentation is discouraging to me. It seems symbolic of some inefficiency in the conference system or organization. If the NSTA national conference system were to become just slightly less efficient, perhaps we will have to submit proposals for next year’s national meeting just ahead of leaving for this year’s meeting! In contrast, I find that most science teachers are flexible, ingenious, great at improvising with just a few materials, and relatively intolerant of inefficiencies. They are probably the world’s greatest “just-in-time” experts. They have to be, with all of the demands now placed upon them—including abstracts for presentations that they may want to give one year from now.

Posted by Steve Pompea at 11:07 AM

From the 2006 NSTA Meeting in Anaheim

Day 1 – Thursday

The National Science Teachers Association meeting generally starts the minute you get off the plane (if not before!) While waiting for my luggage at the airport, I immediately spotted a group of three science teachers who had flown on the same flight from Tucson. They were easy to spot—young, excited to be at their first national conference, and had that agile look that comes from wrestling with young minds.

The three women told me that they came from the same private school in Tucson and taught science from preschool to 5th grade. Our conversation began with problem solving—we needed to get to Anaheim from LAX, a distance purported to be over 40 miles. The conference information had alluded to several ways one might get to the hotels, but it wasn’t quite clear what the best (or cheapest) way might be. I told them about the Disneyland bus that goes right to the conference hotels, but comes only on the hour. They had some information about shuttle vans. We decided on the van, since it was getting late and cold, and the bus, if it existed, wouldn’t be coming for a while. In the van we met another science teacher from Boston. On the way to the conference hotels, we caught up on the usual topics: school testing, teaching young kids, how hard teaching is today, and how we became teachers. As is often the case, one teacher’s father was a teacher, principal, and then superintendent of a school.

When the bus got to the Disneyland area, we parted to pursue our separate dreams for the next few days of collecting pounds of science give-away materials (or kilograms since we science teachers think metric), pages of new curricula, and attending some great talks. They wished me luck as the van dropped me off at what turned out to be the wrong hotel. Getting lost at these meetings turned out to be a common theme, repeated again and again as attendees searched for various rooms for workshops and talks. Though it was getting late, I went out after checking in to the hotel to explore the conference area, and to find our room where our workshop would be held the next morning. While searching for the workshop room I ran into our partners from the GLOBE project and we caught up on the latest statistics for GLOBE at Night and promised to meet for a drink later in the conference.

The next morning, I went to the first of the five workshops that NOAO is presenting, and was thrilled to see it filled with teachers, well ahead of the starting time. (I was equally happy that our presentation room, which was missing tables and chairs at 11 p.m., was now setup properly at 8 a.m.) The workshop was on some new ideas for teaching about the Sun. It was well-presented by one our favorite TLRBSE teachers–she always does a terrific job. With one down and four to go, I decided to head for the next challenge–the exhibit hall.

My usual strategy for the exhibit hall is to make a quick run around, looking for good giveaways that might be scarce a few hours later. This is hard to do though when the exhibit hall makes a soccer field look small. However, I started to make my circuit. My strategy paid off, and I found some great items including a plastic tank with some kind of colored oil inside that made cool waves. (I gave this later to a colleague with a young child.) I also found two great books related to our optics education project, which I bought. Later I checked out the NASA area to see if they were giving out anything special. They had loads of materials, but nothing I hadn’t seen before. I ended up taking a load of calendars, and then ran into someone I had wanted to talk to, who was also taking a load of calendars. He had just made the brash decision to get a box of NASA calendars to bring home to teachers (it was take them or leave them, NASA wouldn’t mail them to him). His decision to take box was worth about 40 pounds, and he was struggling to carry them. I offered to load them onto my rolling map case so we could take them over to store at his booth. It turns out his booth was about 300 yards away, on the other side of the hall. So we had a nice talk on the way over, and once there I met two more people I was hoping to see at the meeting and needed to talk to about our Hands-On Optics project.

That is how it goes at these meetings, the shortest distance between two points seems to always be a detour. You find the people you want to see by some indirect process as often as by the direct action of going to the booth or talk you think they would be at.

There were a few other detours this afternoon, and I am looking forward to a few more tonight. (Actually 3 groups of old friends and colleagues have come by to say hi or talk for a while as I write these words in the hotel lobby.) At the conference today I have already run into about 10 teachers I know from our TLRBSE program and have caught up a bit on their life. Next I will take the pounds of educational materials I have picked up in the exhibit hall back to my hotel, dump it off, and go back to the exhibit hall to continue stocking up. Then I will be ready for tonight’s demonstrations, receptions, and meetings, which will probably go on until about midnight, unless I get distracted by an unavoidable detour again.

Posted by Steve Pompea at 01:42 PM

Fun Fest 2006

A half-dozen members of the NOAO outreach office and an equal number of much- appreciated volunteers banded together this Wednesday-Friday to host three booths at the 4th annual “Funfest” at the Tucson Convention Center, sponsored by Southern Arizona Regional Science and Engineering Fair (SARSEF).

The mayhem inherent in dozens of loosely controlled groups of teachers and students roaming a vast cement-floored exhibit hall, all seeking a few moments of science-related diversion before their buses depart, is probably familiar to anyone who works in public outreach. But the scene never fails to both energize and exhaust.

The energy comes from the steady flow of interested reactions (“oooh, neat!” “cool!”) that emanate from the kids during our demonstrations of the power of reflective mirrors and lasers, and the spooky effects of luminescence. The exhaustion comes from the fourth or fifth straight round of trying to present the same talk or demo with the same enthusiasm and scientific fidelity as the first time, and the frantic effort to restock materials before the next group or the next day’s early start. [Thanks, Connie!]

It was also enlightening how many 3rd and 4th graders seemed perfectly familiar with the gruesome homicide investigation techniques of TV shows like “CSI,” which we appropriated in spirit for one chemi-luminescence activity aimed at slightly older kids. I suppose the ultimate message of “police use scientific techniques to catch bad guys” is a valuable one. Perhaps the astronomical corollary might be, “astronomers use telescopes to catch dangerous space rocks and comets before they hit us.”

Hey, maybe Hollywood could try that one out. Wait, I guess they already have, a couple times—and yet we still only spend a few million dollars per year on the topic. Kitt Peak is contributing through projects like Spacewatch and a sky survey led by Bob Millis of Lowell Observatory that has found more than half of the known Kuiper Belt Objects.

We’d be interested to hear about any special approaches out there to the joys and pitfalls of science fairs.

Posted by Doug Isbell at 11:34 AM