Students and Technology: Gateway to the galaxy, in classrooms soon
November 9, 2009
T. DeLene Beeland
In April 2009, the SMT Center, the James B. Hunt, Jr. Institute for Educational Leadership and Policy, and the International Center for Leadership in Education hosted the second-annual Science Summit in Cary, N.C. One of the themes that emerged from the meeting was incorporating technology in the classroom. This articles looks at the Pisgah Astronomical Research Institute (PARI) and its innovative use of training teachers to bring its technology into their classrooms. PARI’s President Don Cline was the 2008 SMT Center Champion of Science.
Roughly 30 miles southwest of Asheville, the Pisgah Astronomical Research Institute lies nestled between Wolf Mountain and Brevard. Most people who know the facility call it “PARI.”
It used to be many things -- including a NASA tracking and relay station, and a Department of Defense listening station -- but today PARI is a world-class research institute that hasn’t forgotten the little guy: today’s children, who will be the scientists manning its controls tomorrow. About 60 students use its 200-acre campus each summer, and PARI officials estimate they reach between five and 10 thousand students annually through a mobile planetarium lab and distance learning.
Science teacher Derek Dennis of Rugby Middle School in Hendersonville, N.C. hopes to broaden PARI’s impact while also addressing the state’s desire to improve STEM education. Dennis spent several weeks at PARI, in the Pisgah National Forest, in July 2009 as part of his Kenan Fellowship. His project, called “Scientific Inquiry of the Universe through Modern Technology” seeks to link real-world science and technology to remote classrooms in an effort to spark student interest and spur new types of teaching for science and math in grades 6-12.
“The curriculum targets ninth grade earth and environmental science, but it can also cover sixth grade middle school curriculum when it comes to understanding the solar system, or high school physics or chemistry,” Dennis said.
Central to his work is one of PARI’s four radio telescopes, a 4.6-meter instrument nicknamed Smiley. Unlike optical telescopes that collect and concentrate light, radio telescopes collect radio waves, similar to the frequencies your car picks up when you scan for music stations. But at PARI, the radio waves are collected from outer space and are used to plot the position and speed of astronomical objects.
“Basically, just like a star emits light that we can see, it also emits radio waves,” Dennis said. “These scopes pick up the humongous end of the electromagnetic spectrum called the radio spectrum. A radioscope is nothing but a gigantic ear that catches the radio signals coming from the universe.”
Dennis’s fellowship involves assessing the existing curriculum offered by PARI which includes basic lesson plans and online resources and repackaging them, while also developing new lessons so that students and teachers alike can better utilize the resources.
In the past, teachers had to travel to PARI and do a workshop to learn how to use these resources, but Dennis’s work will let those who can’t travel there in person --- for reasons of expense or time --- access PARI from their classrooms and homes. He is designing downloadable podcasts that walk teachers and students how to use the online resources, plus lesson plans and student guides.
“The lessons target concepts like the Doppler effect and wave behavior, but also space exploration, because PARI has a very rich history with the space program,” Dennis said.
PARI Education Director Christi Whitworth said that one limitation her organization has faced in the past is that of training educators to use the instruments on campus. In-person sessions typically offer good results, she said, but they reach a finite number of people, and who’s to say the teacher remembers specific details 18-months later without a refresher course?
“The video podcasting sessions that Derek is producing will address this, and they are designed in a very integrated fashion with middle school teaching,” Whitworth said. “His product will be helpful because it’s not geared toward just teachers; it’s built for students too.”
For example, if a teacher is in the middle of a lesson plan and gets stuck, the podcasts are designed to be perfectly appropriate to pull up during class.
“It’s going to bring the School of the Galactic Radio Astronomy out to groups of people that didn’t previously have access,” Whitworth said, referring to a program built around Smiley, the 4.6 meter radio telescope.
Smiley offers an attention-grabbing teaching method because kids can manipulate it, aiming it where they want. Kids and teachers can even control it remotely from classrooms across the nation using commands over the internet, and they can watch in real time as the scope moves to where they point it.
Dennis has used the remote manipulation in his eighth-grade science class to teach kids about the scientific method. He also knows a ninth grade teacher who used it for teaching underprivileged kids.
“I can’t think of any place else in the world where students can basically log on to the internet and control a radio telescope from their classrooms,” Dennis said. “The experience catches their attention because through the interface they can see that the commands they enter are making it turn and move.”
Many math lessons can also be derived for high school students by manipulating Smiley on a coordinate grid system and interpreting details about the solar system or galaxy from its data.
“For example, we can determine using the Doppler effect how fast we’re going around the sun, how fast we’re moving around the galaxy and whether we’re moving away or toward the galactic center,” Dennis said.
But the beauty of PARI’s programs is their plasticity in being able to target a wide spectrum of grade levels and student abilities. Several summer programs also allow kids hands-on access to PARI’s scopes and instruments.
“Kids get really interested when they see this place, because they can do hands-on exploration of the solar system here,” Dennis said.
Building kids math, science and technology skills though novel approaches like those offered at PARI, is essential to positioning them to enter top-earning degree fields at the university level. According to a recent news story by CNN Money.com, math was the common denominator among the 15 degree paths that led to the highest paying entry-level jobs. Only three of the top-15 earning degrees were not within engineering, according to the National Association of Colleges and Employers, but they still required strong foundational math skills.
Reports like this reinforce what a lot of educators and business people already intuit, which is that our state and our communities need to invest a lot more in getting kids not only interested in the science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) fields, but excelling in them.
