Cohort archive
The third summer
Four of the six teachers had done this before. This in-person 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 of the three in-person cohorts documented here.
- 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 third in-person 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 came next
2019 closed the three in-person cohorts documented on this site, but it did not close DSPIRA. NSF Award 1611114 continued through 2021. Beginning in summer 2020, participants shifted their effort into the public lessons site and remote collaboration.
Teachers kept building after the original award ended, updating lesson material in 2025 while community contributors helped telescope users. A follow-on workshop brought DSPIRA to another group of educators. The collection now includes 51 free lessons across eleven modules.
The program's conference paper came out in 2019—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
Use the lessons online
51 lessons covering the astronomy, the hardware, the signal processing and the labs—free and maintained by the DSPIRA community.
← DSPIRA program Cohorts 2017 2018 2019