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 an NSF Research Experiences for Teachers site at West Virginia University. WVU’s Lane Department of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering ran the program. Partners were the WVU Center for Gravitational Waves and Cosmology and Green Bank Observatory.
Each cohort spent four weeks in Morgantown and two at Green Bank. Teachers stayed involved remotely during the following school year. Teachers practiced the engineering method through research, design, construction, and testing. They developed signal processing techniques needed by the next generation of radio telescopes. 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.