10D-2 - The Mauna Kea Scholars Program and How We Make Astronomy Research Accessible to High School Students

Abstract: The Mauna Kea Scholars Program, started in 2015, provides an opportunity for local high school students to apply for telescope time on the Hawai'i telescopes. Mentors (mostly graduate students) work with local high school science classes, to prepare the students to submit simplified telescope proposals on topics of their choice. Several of the students are then awarded telescope time to observe their chosen targets, and are paired up with additional astronomy mentors to help with aspects of data collection and analysis.

One difficulty we have encountered while mentoring students is the steep learning curve associated with using astronomical software and/or the problems of installing this type of software on a student's laptop. What starts off as an astronomy project will often become more like a computer science project with the programming skills needed to examine, explore, and make measurements on astronomy data. It may not be possible, for example, to install python or ds9 on a student's chromebook, and that may be the only computer that the student has access to. What then?

We have created a number of web-based tools, that can be run on chromebooks and any device that has an html5 compliant web browser, to allow students to explore both MegaCam images as well as ESPaDOnS spectra. In this way, students can focus instead on the science topic they are exploring, rather than trying to get the software to 'work'. These tools are open source, GPLv3 licensed, and available via github. We will demonstrate a few examples of how to use the software.