Description:

This free professional development workshop is focused on high school STEM teachers in the Chicago region. Additional grade levels, STEM teaching topics, and educational support roles are welome too. Lunch provided, and ISBE PD hours can be requested. Virtual option available.

With the launch of new telescopes and the advent of AI, the field of space sciences has been rapidly evolving. This professional development workshop, hosted by the Northwestern University Center for Interdisciplinary Exploration and Research in Astrophysics (CIERA), will help teachers learn the latest news about space, answer questions their students have been asking, network with other educators, and receive resources from CIERA and their peers.

Teachers from across all STEM fields, such as Earth and space sciences, chemistry, computer science, and physics, are encouraged to join! During the workshop, you will hear from Gideon McFarland, an astronomy graduate student at Northwestern University, about the latest "hot topics" in space science, such as 3I/ATLAS, Rubin Observatory, and the launch of SPHEREx. In addition, Lindsay House, a postdoctoral preceptor at the NSF-Simons AI Institute for the Sky, will give a talk about her research. She is the project lead for the NASA Zooniverse project, Dark Energy Explorers, which engages the public in labeling galaxies using the third-largest telescope in the world. Her talk will delve into how she uses those labels to inform machine learning models and learn about dark energy and the expansion of the universe.

After the talks and a catered lunch, the workshop will shift to focusing on resources that teachers can take back to the classroom. We encourage teachers to come with their own resources to share, but CIERA will provide an introduction to STEM Zooniverse projects, interactive investigations about the Rubin Observatory, online courses on AI developed by the National Science Foundation, and information about our other programs for teachers and students.

Register below by 4pm on Feb 13.

Questions can be emailed to James [dot] Schottelkotte [at] Northwestern [dot] edu