The program
About DSPIRA
A three-summer NSF program that put radio telescopes in the hands of high school teachers.
Digital Signal Processing in Radio Astronomy (DSPIRA) was a National Science Foundation Research Experiences for Teachers site at West Virginia University, run by the WVU Lane Department of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering with the WVU Center for Gravitational Waves and Cosmology and the Green Bank Observatory.
Each cohort spent six weeks on site — four in Morgantown and two at Green Bank — and stayed involved remotely through the school year that followed. Teachers worked through the engineering method by doing it: researching, designing, building and testing the digital signal processing techniques that the next generation of radio telescopes depends on. Everything was built with open-source tools, the same ones the lab uses on real instruments.
The cohort program ran in 2017, 2018 and 2019 and has concluded. The lessons those teachers wrote are what this site is, and they are still maintained.
The cohorts
- Summer 2019
- Summer 2018
- Summer 2017
- The program in full, on the lab’s site
From a participant
Tad Herman, one of the 2018 teachers, kept a day-by-day blog of the whole summer.