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It is the responsibility of today's scientists, engineers, and educators to inspire and encourage our youth into technical careers that benefit our society. Too often, however, this responsibility is buried beneath daily job demands and the routines of teaching. Space Public Outreach Team (SPOT) programs leverage a train-the-trainer model to empower college students to make meaningful impacts in their local communities by engaging and inspiring younger students through science presentations. SPOT takes advantage of the excitement of space and the natural way college students serve as role models for children. The result is a win-win program for all involved. This paper describes the original Montana SPOT program, presents analyses demonstrating the success of SPOT, gives overviews of program adaptations in West Virginia and with the NANOGrav collaboration, describes how college student presenters are able to share complex topics, and discusses the importance of college student role models. We hope that our experiences with SPOT will help others implement similar strategies in their own communities.

The recent discovery and ongoing detection of Einstein's predicted gravitational waves offers an exciting opportunity for engaging the general public in science. In order to reach a wide range of people with different science-art identities, levels of physics expertise, age, and gender, the "Celebrating Einstein" festival merges science, dance, and music. Festival components include: (1) a danced lecture with choreography inspired by representations of black holes and gravitational waves, and (2) live interviews with physicists that address issues of science, philosophy, religion, art, and education. We assessed the impact of this festival by deploying a pre- and post-event survey at three "Celebrating Einstein" festivals hosted in different sites in the United States (Northern, Southern, and Central), and by interviewing a subset of attendees at one location. This study focuses on participants' knowledge gain, interest in science, and emotional reactions towards this science-art event. We explored how knowledge gain varies by participant demographics, how it correlates with an increased interest in science and intention to attend future science-art events, and how participants engaged emotionally. Results indicate that the science-art format effectively reached a wide range of demographic groups, significantly increased participants' knowledge, interest in science and science-art events, and broadened their perception of scientists.

The STEM Public Outreach Team (SPOT) at the University of Washington Bothell (UWB) provides training and community building opportunities for diverse STEM students that impact their persistence in STEM majors and careers. The University of Washington Center for Evaluation and Research for STEM Equity (CERSE) evaluated the experiences of SPOT Student Ambassadors to identify and strengthen the program elements that lead to motivation, confidence, and belonging for students from groups underrepresented in STEM fields. Current and former UWB SPOT Student Ambassadors participated in interviews for both formative and summative evaluation over two years identifying motivations, rewards, challenges, and improvements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One hundred years ago, Albert Einstein presented his general theory of relativity, our foundational theory of gravity. A direct consequence of this theory is the prediction that violent cosmic events [...]

It is the responsibility of today's scientists, engineers, and educators to inspire and encourage our youth into technical careers that benefit our society. Too often, however, this responsibility is buried beneath daily job demands and the routines of teaching. Space Public Outreach Team (SPOT) programs leverage a train-the-trainer model to empower college students to make meaningful impacts in their local communities by engaging and inspiring younger students through science presentations. SPOT takes advantage of the excitement of space and the natural way college students serve as role models for children. The result is a win-win program for all involved. This paper describes the original Montana SPOT program, presents analyses demonstrating the success of SPOT, gives overviews of program adaptations in West Virginia and with the NANOGrav collaboration, describes how college student presenters are able to share complex topics, and discusses the importance of college student role models. We hope that our experiences with SPOT will help others implement similar strategies in their own communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By precisely monitoring the "ticks" of Nature's most precise clocks (millisecond pulsars), scientists are trying to detect the "ripples in spacetime" (gravitational waves) produced by the inspirals of supermassive black holes in the centers of distant merging galaxies. Here, we describe a relatively simple demonstration that uses two metronomes and a microphone to illustrate several techniques used by pulsar astronomers to search for and detect gravitational waves. An adapted version of this demonstration could be used as an instructional laboratory investigation at the undergraduate level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Black (W)hole is an immersive art installation created collaboratively by artists and scientists utilizing data visualization of an extreme mass ratio inspiral (EMRI) and the sonification of its emitted gravitational waves in an experiential work of "artscience" and science education. The sensory-rich environment of the installation engages mind and body, expanding and enriching the participant's capacity to imagine and wonder about the beauty and meaning of this highly abstract astronomical object, the black hole. The work investigates both historical and current gravitational wave astronomy, illustrating our 21st-century understanding of the cosmos. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Space Public Outreach Team (SPOT) recruits and trains undergraduate ambassadors from all disciplines to deliver astronomy and space-science-themed interactive presentations. They deliver these presentations to primary and secondary schools and organisations across the state of Montana, USA. SPOT was started in 1996 by physics graduate students at Montana State University, USA, and it has grown to reach an average of 10 000 students per year for a low institutional cost of less than five dollars (four euros) per student. In the last year, the Montana SPOT model has been adopted in the state of West Virginia. The West Virginia SPOT programme also shows great potential, with eleven ambassadors trained to give two new feature presentations, reaching over 2600 students. In this paper, we describe how the Montana SPOT model works in practice and discuss how this model was adapted with new resources, and for a new audience, such that others may also adapt the programme to inspire space science interest for their own particular setting. We invite these groups to plug into the SPOT brand to broaden the impact of astronomy and space programmes and applications in their own region. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]