Outreach

Warrior Scholars program

Overview -
The Warrior Scholar Project is a unique program developed to support veterans across the country who are considering pursuing higher education after their service. During the 2 week program, students attend lectures, complete assigned readings and homework, and participate in research projects. In particular, the program: 1) builds problem solving skills; 2) shows students that they are capable of returning to academia and that they have the skillsets to succeed in higher education; and 3) introduces the students to people and support structures that can provide moral and mentoring support during their academic journey, even after the conclusion of the program.

The program uniquely identifies the various specific needs of this population of students, who often lie at a unique intersection between multiple minoritized identities in higher education (including race, socio-economic background, educational background, etc). Thus, they are able to provide informed support for the students as they transition from the military to higher education, and provide the structure to ensure the existence of a long-term community!

My involvement as a Research Project Leader -
I worked as a research project leader for the Warrior Scholar Program in the summers of 2019 and 2020. Each year, I set goals for myself as an educator, and for the learning outcomes of my students.
Goals:

• I wanted my students to be comfortable making mistakes and asking for help when they had questions, but to also feel encouraged to try solving a hard problem on their own.
• I aimed to make the research project material as accessible as possible, both in terms of the computing needs of the students, as well as their various educational histories.
• I wanted each student to be able to feel comfortable enough with the research material to talk about it in their own words.
• I wanted each student to realize they were capable of research, and to come to view themselves as "coders" and problem solvers.
• I planned to make the materials that I developed for the program publicly available on my Github.

In 2019, the students that participated in the University of Arizona program were split into 3 research groups, each of which was paired with a different research project leader. Prior to the start of the program, I was asked to develop a week-long research project that covered coding and the fundamentals of research. I based much of the research project material I developed on material from one of the project leaders from the previous year. The project material consisted of a series of Jupyter Notebooks that presented the fundamentals of exoplanet theory and detection, then had the students create their own research project ideas based on the material. I significantly restructured and rewrote the Jupyter Notebooks to ensure they were up to date and achieved the goals that I had set for the project. In particular, I focused on:

• Updating and expanding documentation throughout the Jupyter Notebook series so that the content could stand alone without my in-person explanation.
• Adding an "Introduction to Python" Notebook to teach students about the syntax and usage of python, including a discussion about libraries/packages and good coding practices.
• Rewriting background material to be much less technical and more relevant to the research project goals.
• Reformulating the research problem so each student was performing the same analysis, but they got the freedom to choose what exoplanet system they wanted to focus on (either from a list of well-studied exoplanet systems), or a system of their own findings.
• Changing the structure of the code in the notebooks to first show how something could be done, and then giving students similar tasks to follow along themselves.
• Using Google Colab to host the Jupyter Notebooks so that students could edit and run the Notebooks without needing their own python distribution on their laptops.

The first notebook provided the students with an introduction to programming concepts in python.The following notebooks then built upon these learned programming skills to simulate exoplanet orbits and analyze light curve data from the Kepler Space Telescope database. The students learned about exoplanet dynamics and detection methods, and presented their own exoplanet orbital models at the end of the program. The Github repository for the 2019 program can be found here: 2019 WSP Project Repository. (Note: the link for the 2020 version of this project can be found below, and contains vital updates and clarifications, so I would suggest utilizing the newer version.)

The notebooks that I developed were well liked by the WSP coordinators, and were circulated to the project leaders of all Warrior Scholar Programs the following year.

Challenges introduced by the pandemic and remote participation-
In 2020, the Warrior Scholar's Project continued virtually, with students joining via video call from around the US (and in some cases around the world). I managed the research project portion of the program as Head Research Project Leader, and oversaw 2 other graduate student project leaders who were new to the program. The two other project leaders and I all used the same set of materials that I had already developed and had a lot of success with the prior year, so we discussed how we could improve the project even more.

The Jupyter Notebooks that I'd developed the previous year were well suited for in-person delivery, but were not necessarily well suited for virtual instruction. In particular, there were many breaks integrated into the workbooks to allow for students to interact and do their own exploration, or where I was supposed to check student responses individually. After discussion with my project co-leaders, we decided to keep the regular check-ins, and to encourage students to unmute frequently to interject the same way they would in person.

Despite these changes, students were still very hesistant to engage with each other, or to ask each other questions or troubleshoot among themselves. In hindsight, it became clear that attempting to mimic the same interactions that occured during the in-person program was not the solution, and it would have been more helpful to rethink the way that the research projects were delivered as a whole. For example, if there was more emphasis on group coding or on anonymous contributions to the conversation, it may have led to better engagement with the students overall.