Bringing the Solar Corona into the Virtual Classroom: Transitioning from In-Person to Virtual Mentoring

Abstract:

The COVID-19 pandemic has reshaped every aspect of our global society, from how we work to how we communicate, and educating tomorrow’s scientists and engineers is no exception. For the last three years, we have brought radio astronomical remote-sensing of the Sun’s corona into the classroom during the academic year and, in turn, have brought students into the lab in the summers. Then, at the end of March 2020, stay-at-home orders were issued, abruptly ending the in-person mentoring component that had been so crucial to this joint venture between the Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology and the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory. Prior to the pandemic, the principle goal of this endeavor was to bring the research (and researcher) to students in the Senior Astronomy and Astrophysics Laboratory, exposing them to solar physics and radio astronomy. In addition to this, we also tried to provide students with ample opportunities to promote their research results (e.g., at science fairs, school fairs, and AGU’s Virtual Poster Showcase). We discuss the challenges of transitioning from in-person to virtual mentoring. In particular, our student research program had to evolve from primarily observational analysis to modeling studies of the corona. We also highlight the research achievements our of summer students, from modeling radio line-of-sight effects induced by coronal mass ejections to understanding time-dependent effects of the heliospheric current sheet.