OUTREACH

Recently a fellow graduate student, Jeremy A. Lusk, and I were awarded the $10,000 Thatcher Hoffman Smith Prize to do science outreach across Oklahoma. To that end, we have donated our award to the University of Oklahoma Foundation and created a student organization called Lunar Sooners. This money will fund our outreach endeavors and ensure that these efforts are sustainable beyond our time here at OU.

Outreach is something that the graduate students at OU have been working on for a few years now. For instance, we traveled to the Washita Battlefield National Historic Site in May 2011 near Cheyenne, Oklahoma to train their staff to operate a newly purchased telescope. They have since started hosting their own public viewings for their visitors.

We drove to Quartz Mountain near Lone Wolf, Oklahoma in June 2013 to host a star gazing elective for the final night of the Oklahoma Arts Institute Summer Camp. The campers were high school students studying music, dance, and other art forms. We treated the students to views of nebulae, galaxies, stellar clusters, and planets. We have since been asked back to OAI and anticipate this to be an annual event for us.

We hosted an event for a local cub scout group in January 2014 where we set up five 8-inch telescopes to view the sky. The viewing was followed by a scaled model of the solar system demo in which each child made a model of the solar system scaled to their height using receipt paper. Now, we hold regular events with cub scout and JROTC groups based in Norman.

With this grant, we will be able to expand the scope of our events to include interactive demonstrations that we believe are key to giving students a chance to internalize the science concepts we are introducing to them.

Lunar Sooners in the news:

Meet the Lunar Sooners | Grant Allows Students to Form Lunar Sooners

This winter I was invited to participate in the second AAS Astronomy Ambassador

Workshop held in Washington, DC. During the two-day workshop we learned many

techniques for effectively communicating science concepts to the public. We gained

access to a plethora of resources to aid in our outreach efforts as well as a sense of

community with our fellow ambassadors.

The most important thing I learned from the workshop is how much more effective it is to have an ongoing outreach partnership with a local school or group than to only visit them once. Repeat visits help to establish a relationship between the children and the outreach volunteers that is essential to the learning process as well as to the intended transition toward an affinity for science.

In January 2012 I jump started a departmental outreach program at the OU observatory where members of the public can visit every week to use our facilities to peer at the night sky. This program has been going strong since then! Every Wednesday while the university is in session the OU Department of Physics & Astronomy hosts a free public star party at the observatory. Click here for more information.