Cohort archive
The last summer
Four of the six teachers had done this before. The third summer was less about learning the instrument than about writing down what three years had taught them.
- 6teachers
- 6states
- 4returning
- 6weeks
- Morgantown + Green Bank
Who was here
The 2019 cohort
Six teachers, four of them returning for a second or third summer — the most experienced cohort the program had, and its last.
- John Makousreturning NC
- Howard Chunreturning RI
- Tad Hermanreturning NY
- John Clarkereturning FL
- Robert Baker CA
- Michael Stover WV
01
A different kind of summer
By 2019 the shape of the program was settled: four weeks in Morgantown building a horn antenna, a low-noise amplifier and a software spectrometer, then two weeks at the Green Bank Observatory observing with it.
What was different was who turned up. Four of the six teachers had already been through it, two of them for the third time — which meant the summer did not have to start from first principles. The returning teachers already knew GNU Radio well enough to write their own blocks, and had spent the intervening school years running these projects with their own students.
So the emphasis moved. Less time on getting the instrument working; more on consolidating three years of labs, lectures and classroom activities into something another teacher could pick up cold.
02
Written by the teachers
The clearest output of the final summer was a site the teachers curated themselves. Classroom Radio Astronomy collected the lessons and exercises they had developed and tested — written by the people who had actually run them in front of students, rather than by the faculty who ran the program.
That site was archived in 2026 and everything on it was migrated into the main lessons site, alongside the material from the summer institute's own repository. The teachers' AP Physics velocity-curve unit is there in full. The old address still resolves, but only to a page pointing here.
Where it lives now
The velocity curve unit
The 2019 cohort's own material, migrated into the lessons site and still maintained.
03
What outlasted it
2019 was the third and final cohort. Fifteen teachers from eight states had filled twenty-one places across the three summers, and what they built together is still standing: 48 free lessons across eleven modules, covering the astronomy, the hardware, the signal processing and the labs.
The program's own conference paper came out the same year — and two of its four authors, John Makous and Howard Chun, are teachers from these cohorts rather than staff. That was the point of the whole exercise.
Everything they used
The lessons are still online
48 lessons covering the astronomy, the hardware, the signal processing and the labs — free, and still maintained.
← DSPIRA program Cohorts 2017 2018 2019