Non-science students enrolled in astrophotography classes created by scientists at the University of California, Riverside reported a better understanding of how to use a telescope and camera and how to process images, according to a recently published paper about the class.
In addition, after taking the classes, the students, most of whom were UC Riverside non-STEM (Science, Technology. Engineering, Mathematics) majors, were eager to take up astrophotography as a hobby, opening the path to become future citizen scientists and amateur astronomers, groups which historically have analyzed a lot of astronomical data and made numerous discoveries.
The idea of the classes was to engage students majoring in fields such as social sciences, humanities, business and arts in science. Astronomy is considered by many a gateway into science. More than 200,000 non-science majors enroll in an introductory astronomy class every year in the United States, but this will likely be their only interaction with a natural science during their undergraduate studies.
Astrophotography is a great way to teach science in a visual and hands-on manner, De Leo Winkler said. It also provides a way to break through the mathematical anxiety that many non-science majors experience.
https://ucrtoday.ucr.edu/43195
[Paper]: Astrophotography, a portal for engaging non-STEM majors in science
[Also Covered By]: Phys.org
I believe that Amateur Radio, Amateur Radio Astronomy, Amateur Rocketry (and similar activities) also has the potential to attract people, from all walks of life, to STEM subjects. Do you people think that this could be the best way to attract people to STEM disciplines ?
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 27 2016, @11:32AM
See the body parts you will never touch, should you choose a career in STEM.
Just like the stars and planets you will never visit.
(Score: 2) by looorg on Tuesday December 27 2016, @11:54AM
Some anecdotal evidence, the class was taught by an acquaintance of mine and he shared his experience. The university I attended for my masters did something similar, not so much astrophotography but more stargazing and astronomy. Turns out the course got filled almost exclusively with senior citizens and they where just interested in the subject and not very interested at all in doing any assignments or actually passing the course. The theory was ok - it did attract a lot of new students with non-stem backgrounds, they just where not that into the whole university system or actually graduating or passing the course. They just liked watching the stars and going to lectures. Which turned into a loss for the university and they had to drop the course after a semester. Guess it was the drawback of a free education system, universities gets paid by the government for actually passing students and not just enrolling them.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday December 27 2016, @01:46PM
Which turned into a loss for the university and they had to drop the course after a semester. Guess it was the drawback of a free education system, universities gets paid by the government for actually passing students and not just enrolling them.
Can't they just offer it non-credit? I took some Japanese classes that way at my local state-U. My wife took some photographic art classes the same way.
There are huge cognitive dissonance problems with non-credit non-degree courses in that non-credit course fees are like $10/credit, which is probably close to the real cost of providing the room and instructor, although if you take the same course with the same instructor and same assignments for credit its right up to "what the market will bear" at $200+/credit or whatever it is.
If the state U system existed to educate the taxpaying populace a BS degree would cost about one or two grand total. If its all a financial scam (which it is) then you get the whole $100K of student loans BS for the same classes. In the old days the State U system existed to provide college sports as a service, I donno if things have gone uphill or downhill in a philosophical sense from there.
Another novelty is the local state-U extension offers individual non credit classes, a certificate, AS degree, and BS degrees in womens studies, but its basically all the same classes with differing amounts of "well rounded-ness" bolted on to the identical core classes. So if you want to study women (and what male does not) then you can pay wildly varying amounts of money and obtain wildly varying official titles of nobility at the end if you jump thru the hoops and bark the correct things in response, but you're gonna take the same classes regardless of result.
Its amusing that when I moved here about six blocks from campus I was all ready to take fun classes for entertainment but instead the kids start squirting out of my wife and the internet happens and now I have very little motivation to walk to campus after work to listen to a philosophy lecture when there's stanford's plato online and perfectly good lectures on archive.org or pirated or coursera or whatever, so I've taken a grand total of 1 non-credit class.
Also my Japanese classes were almost entirely made up of teen and near teen anime fans, I was the only person there who was like "eh" and didn't have a waifu pillow or collect box sets like some collect legos. Taking a wild guess the fine arts lab classes probably contain a lot of stereotypical art school chix and the STEM classes are probably like the ones I took decades ago that were total sausage-fests. I think our graduating class had one girl make it to the start of op amp class (it had a long silly name that only a committee could of created of course, the class I mean, not the girl). From memory power supply rectification topologies was her downfall, and many of the guys also seemed incapable of wiring a simple full wave rectifier in lab without starting a fire... scary to think decades later those same guys are designing lithium battery protection circuits and nuclear plant equipment and stuff like that.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by anubi on Tuesday December 27 2016, @11:59AM
Many engineering careers are not going anywhere. [electronicproducts.com]
Just a personal anecdote here, but it sure seems to me there is presently a severe glut of highly trained electrical engineers out there right now. I know several of them where I am working right now. I am doing so just to stay "employed", more like an alibi as to where I am spending time, not an income source. I am an engineer of the sixties, so take that with a grain of salt... well versed in obsolete technologies.
STEM demands a lot of time from someone if they are going to do it right.
My own feeling is are you doing this because its what you are driven to do by something inside you, are or you trying to support a family?
If you love creating things, and are happy with dying a lone pauper ( even Nikola Tesla did so ), go for STEM, but if you need money, you probably want to be the guy who gives permission for others to do something. Something in the Finance/Insurance/RealEstate (FIRE) industry, which seems much more financially rewarding in the USA than producing anything.
Until tax law changes making investment in people more rewarding than investing in flip houses, I don't see this changing. Given the financial pressures of a crony capitalistic driven economy, much riches for a few come at a cost of a mad dive for the bottom for the ones who are not in position to benefit from tax law.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by VLM on Tuesday December 27 2016, @01:59PM
I'm in the niche of working at an EE related utility but not as an EE more as programmer/sysadmin. Early training was weird because they can't process an "untrained outsider" knowing all kinds of electronic tech stuff. They were spooked, like at the start of "Dune" when Paul somehow knew all about being a freman. Wait I don't understand how can you know what a decibel is? Wait wait wait its supposed to take an hour for me to explain what group velocity dispersion is, you can't be explaining it to me in 30 seconds with oil pipeline analogies. Are you sure you didn't work at a different office or for a competitor, how can you as an outsider know our magic secrets like the care and feeding of a spectrum analyzer? Wait wait this is illogical how can you know broadband amplifier stabilization techniques without having worked here and taken my training class first? It was actually kinda funny.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 27 2016, @02:35PM
He shall know your ways as if born to them.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 27 2016, @05:44PM
Maybe tell them that someone smarter than you or them them invented the tools they are using and told them how to use them. Maybe that will just blow their mind.
Also, sounds like your "EE related utility" is a telco or cable company.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 27 2016, @05:36PM
Just a personal anecdote here, but it sure seems to me there is presently a severe glut of highly trained electrical engineers out there right now.
So switch to be Electrician and kick some non-educated asses. Sure, you don't need EE to install plugs, but it sure helps if you are applying for industrial electrician or whatever. You can definitely differentiate there. And someone will have to maintain the robots.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by aim on Tuesday December 27 2016, @01:21PM
Disclaimer: I have taken up astrophotography as a hobby about 4 1/2 years ago, and I'm still learning the ropes.
One may learn one's way around the sky, to operate a telescope, guiding etc., how to properly take pictures, how to process them and so on... and at the end, if you did everything right, you may have some pretty pictures to show for it.
From there to actually doing science is quite another step. You'd have to make first observations of comets, asteroids or somesuch, i.e. compare pictures of the same region over time, check with astronomical databases, whatever... and communicate your results in the right places, if you think you've actually found something new. I'm not sure if there are very many astrophotographers active that way, most of those I read from in the local astro-community or in specialized facebook groups seem to only go for the aesthetics.
Note, I'm not dissing anyone, aesthetics is fine by me. If some people have their fun going to the hassle of doing all the work it takes to make some discovery, more power to them.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 27 2016, @01:40PM
best way to attract people to STEM
First of all, STEM is a useless acronym because it is made up of widely different fields that are not even remotely interchangeable (social psychologists will not have adequate training for a mechanical engineering job).
Secondly, is there enough jobs to support those that already exist in the field?
Thirdly, is the rate of new graduates less than the demand?
(Score: 4, Interesting) by VLM on Tuesday December 27 2016, @02:46PM
I believe that Amateur Radio ... Do you people think that this could be the best way to attract people to STEM disciplines
Ham radio is weird in that lots of teens get licenses and are super active, then life intrudes and activity level drops somewhere between a little and all the way down to zero, and then after retirement like clockwork up goes the antennas at 65 yrs and some old dude will be on the air a hundred hours for every hour a 40-something dude can eek out to get on the air, so it incorrectly looks like most hams are 65+ or 22- and not much in between, although actually numerically your average ham is more or less the average population distribution, maybe biased to much higher IQ segment.
Well anyway the point of the above is over the last almost 3 decades I've talked (... or digital, you get what I mean) to many thousands of hams over the air and they're all interested in the STEM-ish hobby of ham radio but maybe only a quarter are into STEM professional work disciplines.
Obviously it depends strongly on mode, purpose, band, time of day... but most hams you talk to are not going to be into STEM as a job.
I'm just saying its indirect at best. Most STEM people are into some combination of Trek, Star Wars, anime, (hard and/or soft) Sci Fi, cosplay, DnD, "technical hobbies (ham, photo gadget collector, arduino wrangler", however most people into anime or star wars or the rest, are not STEM people.
I think everyone who knows how to design a bias circuit for the transistors in a class AB RF amplifier knows what cowboy bebop is, but virtually no one who know what cowboy bebop is knows EE stuff.
(insert pretty obvious analogy of Venn diagrams and relative population sizes and overlaps here)
Maybe an even better analogy is I bet 100% of rocket scientists played with model rockets as a kid, but only a microscopic fraction of model rocket experimenters become professional rocket scientists.
I'm just saying that if you pursue that strategy for recruitment, you have to be chill with the idea that 99% failure rate of converting hams to EE, will still produce more EE than there are jobs for them. We already graduate far more EE than we have jobs for them, so they do other stuff. I've never worked in the field I've always done "computer stuff", there's just no jobs, or they want 15 years of avionics experience and a MSEE for an entry level job where someone knowing ohms law would be overqualified. Because they can. Because there's way too many EE being produced for the very few jobs they're trained for.
Arguably we have too many STEM grads already and need to cut back quite a bit, not boost production until no one with a degree can get a job and when they do via supply and demand its $7.25/hr. I don't think ham radio is necessarily a problem or a solution. It is a hell of a fun wide ranging STEM-ish hobby, however. And for most people with EE knowledge or skills, that hobby is the only way they'll ever get to apply those skills because there's simply no jobs out there.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by VLM on Tuesday December 27 2016, @03:11PM
Astronomy is a cool hobby. However, if you want to see something simply awful rub these two web pages together
Here's a list of title of nobility degrees granted in the USA that turn untitled peasants into titled astronomers worthy of a job in the astronomy field by holding a piece of paper:
https://www.aip.org/statistics/reports/roster-astronomy-2015 [aip.org]
Here's a worldwide list of jobs in the astronomy field:
https://jobregister.aas.org/ [aas.org]
There's a little problem here in that there's 130 new USA astronomy PHDs awarded per year, while there's only 25 tenure track job openings worldwide. There's 13 world wide science staff jobs outside academia for the 459 USA bachelors degrees offered to compete for.
I'm kinda missing the point of trying to encourage more astronomy degrees by advertising astrophotography as "fun". Which it is. How does the world or the economy benefit by increasing enrollment such that we might have 4590 recent grads competing for 13 jobs instead of the mere 459 we currently have? Is going from only the top 10% get jobs to only the top 1% get jobs worth the recruitment effort?
Another way of looking at it is current employed jobs:
https://www.bls.gov/ooh/life-physical-and-social-science/physicists-and-astronomers.htm [bls.gov]
Total employment of physicists AND astronomers is 20K. Now I'm guessing the ratio is like 10:1 at least, in favor of physicists. So there's 2K astronomers employed in the USA today. Figure a 40 year career and the USA can adsorb 50 new astronomers per year as the old ones retire. Unfortunately we're producing somewhere around 2.5 to 10 times as many as the market can adsorb. Another way of looking at those numbers is instead of having a 40 year career you'll get one somewhere between 4 years (less time than you went to school for it) and maybe 10 years. You'll still be paying student loans after you reclass into some other job field, competing against too many employees for the job both there and competing against people with degrees in that field not in astronomy.
I'm sure its a cool hobby. Own and sometimes use a telescope myself. Just saying after investing years of study and tens of thousands of dollars the odds of becoming an actual astronomer are extremely low. Meanwhile someone is trying to lower those odds even further... why exactly?