“Moon Over Monmouth” gathered students to observe the moon and watch a documentary while making astronomy-themed collages. On October 20th, STEM Ambassadors hosted this event where you could closely observe the Moon through a telescope in front of the CSB.
“STEM Ambassadors is a class that not only fulfills the community engagement requirement for STEM majors, but it also teaches us how to communicate science effectively,” said Mel Bivolarov, a STEM Ambassador. “We are able to design our own STEM outreach to not only engage with the people around us, but to learn how to communicate science to a wide range of audiences.”
Bivolarov was stationed at one telescope providing information about what attendees were looking at through it. During the event, they were able to learn about the names of craters, trenches, and mountains on the moon, the orbital patterns of the planets and the best times to see them, how the telescopes work, and more.
Professor Michael Solontoi had a second telescope set up that had been pointed to observe Saturn. Bivolarov explained that the second telescope has a GPS feature. “You can tell it to find a planetary object for you, and it will move itself into that direction.”
The STEM Ambassadors organize events on campus as part of their community outreach. “We’re trying to get people, especially younger people...interested in science,” Bella Moore, another STEM Ambassador, said. “Because it’s not the boring thing that everyone thinks it is sometimes. There’s fun stuff to do in STEM.”
“I do this because I wholeheartedly believe in well-roundedness,” Bivolarova said. “I was very passionate about this project because it gave me an opportunity to remind people that science isn’t just working in a lab or doing calculations, but it’s observing the world around us and taking an interest in things that are different from us. Science is talking to people, getting creative, and sharing knowledge.”
