How I plan to help save science education with the Unistellar eVscope!
IMPORTANT UPDATE: My research team is running a GoFundMe to place these Unistellar eVscopes into the hands of teachers and students around the world (South America, Europe, Africa, Australia, etc.). Please go to https://gf.me/u/y767zz or see below for more info.
Lightning strikes a dream
Several weeks ago I had a dream during the intense lightning storms in and around San Francisco and the greater Bay Area, which then sparked some of the devastating wildfires that we are still recovering from and experiencing.
In this dream, I was in my high school chemistry class. My group was asked to answer the problem on the board and when we went up and didn’t know the answer, everyone, including the teacher (and Nelson from the Simpsons), laughed at us. This inspired me to share the failure of the American education system with my students and how the current system values answers over process and problem solving while squashing their creativity and curiosity. Process, problem solving, knowing how to think rather than what, and curiosity and creativity are intrinsic and vital skills for science, education, and innovation in our modern time.
Neil deGrasse Tyson on how our education system and society values answers over the process of thinking and problem solving. Who would you hire, the fact spewer or problem solver?
The American education system is broken
Our students frequently experience these type of responses to their curiosity, creativity, and ambitions: stop asking questions, shut up, listen, do what you’re told, and your dreams are unrealistic. I’m sure you and I have also experienced this. Think of an example of a child splashing in the puddle and being told to stop because he or she was making a mess. We’re told at our earliest age and throughout life to stop being curious. Our creativity, curiosity, and aspirations are not encouraged and developed and most of us live our lives hardened and accepting of the life we live, but deep inside feel a longing for what could have been and in response unconsciously show our resentment on the world through our contributions to keeping the status quo that keeps churning out unhappy people. The untapped potential in this world to create, innovate, discover, make peace, and to to just be happy is many orders of magnitude larger than it should be.
““What makes someone successful in the 21st century is definitely not your ability to memorize facts. What will make someone successful is your relentless capacity to innovate, to create. It’s your ability to network, to make friends from your own circle and from other countries. It’s your ability to see through challenges, to look for opportunities in problems, and to take action to change things instead of waiting for someone else to do something.””
Schools continue to teach us that we are just empty vessels to be filled with information. The currency in the classroom is grades, but I would argue that grades do not matter. Grades do not qualify or transform you into becoming a mover and shaker of tomorrow. Some of the greatest minds and innovators in history never finished school, or performed average, below average, or because of their disdain for the status-quo changed the world and made progressive positive impacts on society.
Most classrooms also deny culture and diversity. Students of color, women, and indigenous people are continually shown that they don’t fit the mold that the system has carved out and continues to manufacture. Even while many great reformers are trying to make a change and some progress has been made, the fact is that the system is fundamentally broken. The wheel doesn’t need to be stopped or repurposed, it needs to be broken and replaced.
When somebody takes up their own initiative, follows their drive, listens to their ambitions, embraces their curiosity, and explores their creativity amazing things can happen. If we replaced the education system into one that encourages and develops collaborative processes, creativity, problem solving, curiosity, and other reasoning skills for all students regardless of color or gender from the earliest age through high school and beyond, I claim we would transform our society into a conveyor belt of movers and shakers, innovators, free thinkers, and happy driven citizens.
Science and economy in peril
I claim that these reformations are not just vital for general education, but extremely important for science education, and also for our society at large. Many studies argue that our 21st century success depends on our population’s ability in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) and that this success correlates directly with achievement in STEM education (see NSF Prepare and Inspire for one example). The Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) provides a comprehensive assessment of a country’s students’ proficiency levels in STEM and the United States has ranked below average in several recent assessments (see PISA 2018).
Picture Credit: marketingmagazine.com
Other studies have shown that American students across all socioeconomic levels score lower in literacy, numeracy, and problem-solving skills than in most countries of the world (see Gaze 2015 article). Lastly, there is a lack of interest of students entering STEM and a brain drain occurring. For the drain, many brilliant minds that do pursue STEM in post-graduate studies come from other countries. These students and professionals have made fantastic innovations and driven our economies. However, now many are leaving America for other countries where there are more opportunities and acceptance than in the US. In other countries, they are even starting their own world-class universities. America if falling way behind and fast.
So what should we do? A lot of brilliant researchers and educators (some quoted, citied, or in video here) have great ideas on how to make our education system better. We should study their ideas and others, and work to change within our communities, as well as at local schools and eventually the national education system. You should educate yourself, be open minded, and you need to vote!
The Unistellar eVscope
In the meantime, while you work on changing the system (hey, we have to do this together), I have some ideas of how I’m going to make an impact in my own way. I plan to utilize a new innovative telescope, the Unistellar eVscope, in K-14 schools with a citizen science initiative for exoplanets using the proven education inquiry-based science pedagogy, Modeling Instruction, mixed together with some rad project-based science units. These plans will also contribute to one portion of my PhD thesis with the University of Southern Queensland to develop an exoplanet citizen science program in education.
The eVscope is portable, easy to set up, and fits in a backpack. Photo: courtesy Unistellar
The Unistellar eVscope is a smart autonomous consumer telescope that is controlled entirely with the user’s smartphone through its innovative app. The telescope and app allow users to align, steer, select deep space objects (such as galaxies, star clusters, and nebulae), and contribute to citizen science projects with a simple touch. Its light amplification power and Enhanced Vision technology allow sky watchers to enjoy beautiful images of the cosmos even in our light polluted skies.
““Unistellar’s goal is to make observational astronomy more enjoyable, accessible, and easier while developing new citizen science programs and increased interest and participation in astronomy in general.” ”
The lone ability to have a robotic telescope bring the night sky back to us light-polluted city dwellers, and be accessible to its users (i.e. no technical knowledge required, however, techies may want to check out the important instrument information below) is an exciting reality with this telescope. However, in my opinion, that is not the most exciting part. In 2019, the SETI Institute signed an MOU with Unistellar to develop their citizen science network and connect users with professional astronomers so they and their eVscopes can contribute to real scientific research concerning comets, supernovae, planetary defense, and exoplanets (see SETI/Unistellar partnership article).
Unistellar eVscope technical info: “Unistellar's new eVscope is a 4.5” (11.4 cm) Newtonian-like (focal length = 450 mm, magnification of 50) telescope designed specifically to work in urban and countryside environments . . . [It] is equipped with a sensor located at the prime focus of the telescope. The sensor is a CMOS low-light detector IMX224 (1/3-type, 1.27 megapixels, 12-bit, up to 60 fps) produced by Sony and characterized by a gain amplifier of up to 72 dB and a low read noise of less than 1 e- which allows us to record multiple frames with exposure times between 1 ms and 4 s. An on-board computer stacks and processes those frames (dark and background removal, shift-adding and stacking) to produce an improved image which is projected in real time through the electronics eyepiece. Each individual frame is stored in the telescope and can be accessed in 12-bit TIFF format by the user for a posteriori data processing and analysis.” (Marchis et al., 2020)
The eVscope has already proved itself capable of contributing to citizen science efforts concerning comets, asteroids and planetary defense, and detecting exoplanets orbiting distant stars in our galaxy (see Detecting Exoplanets and Asteroids: First Citizen Science Successes for Backyard Astronomy and Fragmentation of comet ATLAS observed on the first crowd-sourced pictures from citizen astronomers). The future of citizen science astronomy with this instrument is very bright (even if the stars eVscopes can observe in light polluted skies are not[1] 😉) and I can imagine thousands of telescopes around the world improving upon the signal-to-noise ratio of data collected on important scientific targets while engaging and educating the people of this planet.
[1] eVscopes have observed Pluto, Vmag=14.5, from downtown urban environments (Marchis et al. 2020)
Exoplanet science
Astronomers have found planets similar to Tatooine in Star Wars that orbit around two stars. See Jonti Horner’s article on Kepler-16 (AB)-b that explains this find and phenomenon. Image: www.starwars.com
Exoplanets are planets that orbit stars other than our own Sun. These extrasolar planets were once only realized in science fiction until the first discovered exoplanets were confirmed in the 1990s. Since then, the field of exoplanet research accelerated with the NASA Kepler spacecraft mission, which found thousands of exoplanets in our galaxy. It is now known that at least one exoplanet exists per star in our Milky Way galaxy (Cassan et al. 2012). What kind of exoplanets are out there? Do they look like and have the same characteristics as the planets in our solar system? Do any of them have life? Is there another earth? These are just some of the many questions around this exciting field of research, and some of these questions are starting to have answers. However, with hundreds of billions of stars in our galaxy there are a lot of possibilities, and a lot of space to explore!
NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), currently in operation, is the follow-up to the successful Kepler mission. Its goal is to survey most of the sky for close by exoplanets and find the best Earth or super-Earth sized planets for future missions capable of further characterization, such as determining the makeup of their atmospheres and searching for possible biosignatures, which could indicate the presence of life. Image: NASA
How are these exoplanets found? There are many different exoplanet detection methods, but the most successful and well-known technique is the transit photometry method. With this method, astronomers point their telescopes to a star that may have an exoplanet orbiting around it and if they detect a dimming of the star’s light over time, then that could be indicative of a planet transiting in front of the star from our perspective (see How Do We Detect Exoplanets? from Planetary Society below). However, these candidate exoplanets, many of which are found by space-based telescopes like Kepler and TESS, need to be confirmed by ground-based telescopes to confirm their existence, rule-out false-positives, and conduct other measurements to further characterize the planet.
Learn more about different exoplanet detection techniques at the Planetary Society’s website
Citizen science astronomers have been very clever and have been able to detect exoplanets through the transit method for decades. In fact, the first confirmed transiting exoplanet, HD 209458b, although observed by professional astronomers, utilized equipment accessible to most astronomy hobbyists and proved that small telescopes could participate in this work. Their observation of this historic transit was done with a 4-inch telescope with a charge-coupled device (CCD) that astronomer, Tim Brown, built in his garage (Sincell, 1999).
Citizen astronomers today use consumer telescopes outfitted with expensive digital cameras, filters, and tracking devices to detect exoplanets and have been involved with professional astronomers for various exoplanet follow-up campaigns, such as the Kilodegree Extremely Little Telescope Follow-up Network (KELT-FUN) (Collins et al., 2018). Additionally, there are some online groups and organizations that support citizen astronomers in exoplanet detection, such as Dennis Conti, and his exoplanet group at the American Association of Variable Star Observers (AAVSO). Dennis even has some wonderful tutorials and a self-published guide to exoplanet observing available for free on his website, https://astrodennis.com.
Advanced and technical citizen scientists with elaborate setups.
Some citizen exoplanet astronomers have been very crafty with their equipment. Take this DIY setup with a $93 DSLR camera and tracking mount made from parts at a hardware store, which detected exoplanet, HD 189733 (Schneider, 2014).
The many citizen astronomers, observing exoplanets is admirable and inspiring. However, undertaking an exoplanet observation and data analysis using your own equipment and open-source software requires advanced technical skills and knowledge that most astronomy enthusiasts and telescope owners are unlikely to adopt and learn. This is exactly why the Unistellar eVscope is such a special instrument that has the potential to dramatically change how citizen science astronomy is performed—it’s easy to use, compact, fun, powerful, and has the resources and network of the SETI Institute to drive its development.
eVscopes and exoplanet science
Results are promising! The Unistellar network has been successful in detecting several exoplanet transits. Most notable is the detection of exoplanet Qatar-1b by citizen astronomer, Julien de Lambilly, with his eVscope in Switzerland in April 2020. Since then, the network of over a thousand eVscopes has contributed to Unistellar projects with 35+ transit light curves collected by amateur astronomers, but also newcomers in the field who had never conducted scientific observations in the past.
Transit light curves are used to model an exoplanet transit from collected data. The light curve above shows the transit of gas giant, Qatar-1b, and was processed using the EXOTIC photometry and modeling package (Zellem et al., 2020).
Students and teachers using Unistellar eVscopes can contribute to exoplanet science by helping to confirm candidate exoplanets, but also through NASA’s Exoplanet Watch program. Exoplanet Watch, led by Rob Zellem, is a citizen science initiative to make studies by large professional telescopes more efficient in the future. Large space-based missions that will proceed TESS, such as the James Webb Space Telescope, ARIEL, and PLATO, will look more deeply at the most interesting exoplanets found by TESS to study their atmospheres and search for possible signs of life. However exciting these future missions and their potential discovered are, Zellem et al. (2020) note that the mid-transit times and ephemerides for these planets become “stale” (i.e. the predicted times of future transits will be less accurate) over time and small citizen science telescopes, like the Unistellar eVscope, can help keep these times “fresh” so that when these telescopes launch they are able to efficiently conduct important science on these planets.
Supporting NASA TESS and future exoplanet missions, Exoplanet Watch, Unistellar, the SETI Institute and my contributions via USQ with my teacher/student citizen science network will work to keep transit times fresh and help improve exoplanet research
Other possible benefits of an eVscope exoplanet network include confirming candidate planets, observing long-period (>100 day) exoplanets to detect rings or moons, observing gravitational perturbations (TTVs—transit timing variations) to detect super-Earths, and searching for new exoplanets around less common stars, such as white dwarfs. Lastly, for another portion of my PhD, I am using the University of Southern Queensland’s (USQ) MINERVA-Australis telescope array for NASA TESS exoplanet follow-up and characterization. A network of eVscope citizen scientists at schools could help follow-up, confirm, and/or improve data collection for targets we look at with these professional instruments, which would help support the hypothesis that this network would help the greater exoplanet research community.
My project goals with education and the eVscope, exoplanets, and classrooms across the world. . .
PHOTO/ PIXABAY
IMAGINE being in your high school physics, earth science, or middle or elementary school science class and told that you are going to be in charge of detecting and characterizing a planet around a distant star to help contribute to the search for life in the universe. IMAGINE, as a student, being told that you would be in charge of this project with your peers in a collaborative team under the guidance of your teacher and a professional astronomer—treated as equals and professionals—to plan an observation, analyze the data, conduct science outreach, and in some cases publish your work in a junior academic journal. IMAGINE being a teacher and being told that you could do real publishable science with your students that is exciting and also be able to meet your course’s state science standards (e.g. the reformed more inquiry-based, Next Generation Science Standards, NGSS). IMAGINE being an astronomer and being able to initiate a network of eager citizen scientist students to contribute to your project while also making a lasting and rewarding impact with their communities.
As an education associate at the SETI Institute, my goal is to make those imaginings a reality by placing eVscopes in diverse communities and their Title I schools (low-income) and education centers, and develop a curriculum and teacher training program for a completely student-centered project-based and inquiry-based science learning experience.
EVSCOPE TEACHERS TO USE Citizen science PBL and Modeling Instruction astronomy
Citizen Science PBL:
What is citizen science PBL? PBL is an acronym for project-based learning. PBL is a somewhat new approach to teaching students through immersive and engaging projects instead of your standard direct-instruction, listen, take notes, and take an exam approach. The idea is as old as famous educator, John Dewey, and his education philosophy of “learning by doing” from 1916 (Dewey). In effective PBL, motivation and engagement increases in students when the projects that they are involved with have benefits to society, real-world applications, value, are authentic, and/or are meaningful (Bell, 2010; Blumenfeld et al., 1991; Fortus et al., 2005). In PBL, the students are driving their own learning through inquiry (Bell, 2010). Empirical evidence has shown that this student-centered and interactive approach can also greatly improve student learning, problem solving, and analytical thinking skills in answering high-order questions (Hall & Miro, 2016) common in the field of science.
What is citizen science? Citizen science is scientific research mainly performed by the general public in collaboration with professional scientists in the field. There is evidence to show that involving students in citizen science specific PBL activities can increase motivation and engagement (Bell 2010; Blumenfeld et al. 1991; Fortus et al. 2005; Green et al. 2012; Jenkins 2011) and has been shown to work well with female and male students from various racial, ethnic, underserved, and urban environments (Geier 2008; Harris et al 2015).
Modeling Instruction, GHOU, and Modeling Instruction Astronomy:
Modeling Instruction is an inquiry-based science pedagogy developed by high school physics teacher, Malcolm Wells, and physicist, David Hestenes, in the 1980s and 90s (Wells et al., 1995) that aligns perfectly with the NGSS initiative. It has enjoyed support by the National Science Foundation (NSF) for over 20 years. With Modeling Instruction, there is no lecturing or direct-instruction. The teacher acts as “guide on the side” rather than “sage on the stage,” and student-centered inquiry takes the fore as students construct, validate and apply the fundamental conceptual models of the discipline, doing science as scientists do.
Modeling pedagogy has been shown to be extremely effective across the science disciplines, empowering teachers with both confidence and competence, especially out-of-field teachers (Haag & Megowan 2015). Modeling Instruction initially was funded by a 16-year series of grants from the NSF for 16 years. When this funding expired in 2005, the Modeling teacher community took over, founding the American Modeling Teachers Association (AMTA), a 501(c)(3) non-profit, to continue this work. Originally just for physics teaching, AMTA has expanded its Modeling Workshop offerings to include chemistry, biology, physical science, middle school science, and most recently astronomy.
““If a teacher is indeed wise he does not bid you enter the house of his wisdom, but rather leads you to the threshold of your own mind””
Dan at the Modeling Instruction Astronomy workshop at the University of Louisville (July 2019).
Global Hands-On Universe (G-HOU), is an astronomy education initiative developed by an international team coordinated by astronomy educator and astrophysicist, Carl Pennypacker, to improve upon and make astronomy education more powerful by giving teachers and their students access to robotic telescopes, training them in astronomical data analysis, and to learn to make models and grow their understanding and inspiration from their work with real data. G-HOU partnered with AMTA in 2016 to develop the first ever Modeling Instruction Astronomy workshop to train teachers on the Modeling Instruction pedagogy and applied to astronomy education. With Modeling Astronomy, teachers help students build, test and deploy the fundamental conceptual models of astronomy using the same scientific processes and techniques that professional astronomers use.
Hopes and conclusions . . .
Past exoplanet citizen science initiatives have been successful, however, most have not succeeded in extending their reach past dedicated amateur astronomers with highly technical abilities, or they have focused mainly on big data analysis games mostly adopted by astronomy enthusiasts (e.g. Planet Hunter’s Zooniverse). There are some notable projects that are doing some fantastic work with exoplanet research in education including the Las Cumbres Observatory, EduTwinkle, and others that allow students to access remote telescopes from computers.
Our project aims to place the entire process into the hands of educators and their students. Students and their teachers will have their own mobile observatories—Unistellar eVscopes—to conduct their own observations, they will work together to analyze the data to learn important scientific standards and technological skills, develop science outreach efforts for their research, present their work at conferences, and in some cases will even publish their work in existing and (possibly) newly created junior academic journals. Teachers will hopefully be enriched too and reignited with their passion for teaching, attract new teachers to the profession, and get them excited about doing real science with their students and publishing.
Additionally, I want to develop this program so that it reaches the most diverse students and inspire them with social-justice-centered science pedagogy, culturally relevant pedagogy, and reality pedagogy so students feel empowered to take ownership of their learning and communities. They will see themselves and other communities and nations under the same stars with the humbling and inspirational nature of astronomy.
Ancient stars may have led early humans to walk upright (Melott & Thomas, 2019, click for NBC article).
Image: Adrian Lam / NBC News
Our students are explorers too. It’s time we stop beating the curiosity and wonder out of them and let them explore, wander, wonder, and embrace their curiosity and creativity.
To the stars!
To listen to an interview with the author, Dan Peluso, and the American Modeling Teachers Association (AMTA) podcast, Science Modeling Talks, where he discussed many of these ideas and this project please click here or the image above.
GoFundMe to provide eVscopes to teachers around the world!
Teachers around the world need powerful resources to motivate, inspire, and educate their students.
Now, we can unlock the wonders of the universe by providing educators with a revolutionary scientific instrument that connects their students to the cosmos, real astronomers and people around the world: the Unistellar eVscope.
Please visit the GoFundMe page to learn more and to help these teachers and their students make wonderful discoveries of the cosmos!
https://gf.me/u/y767zz
References
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