Digital Commons Network^™

Using A Minoritized Graduate Instructor Identity To Cultivate An Inclusive And Diverse Learning Space, Faqryza Ab Latif

Exploring How We Teach

• How to humanize the classroom climate and establish an authentic presence that can challenge the conventional Westernized classroom structure.
• How graduate instructors can use their malleable identity to their advantage in cultivating an inclusive community of diverse learners. There are experiences that are unique to graduate instructors, especially for those of us who come from underrepresented cultural backgrounds. These experiences can be utilized to construct a more inclusive and diverse learning environment, which could then encourage students to do the same.

A Love Letter To My Little Girl, Melissa Leaym-Fernandez

Exploring How We Teach

• Love is a real power. It can be shown by family members who want you to succeed in healthy ways, instructors who are passionate for their work, and the care you give yourself—care for yourself during your graduate experiences.
• Creativity helps the brain to be healthy and strong. Enact creativity in your life by artistic expressions, art making, or—for the super intimidated—journaling your thoughts/ideas/feelings to strengthen your brain.
• Gratitude is a gift to be shared. Send a handwritten note to two folks who have shared their love and who care for you personally or who have shared a passion/professional love …

Navigating The Multiple Roles Of Mathematics Graduate Teaching Assistants In Pursuit Of Racial Equity, Access, And Justice, Kristyn Lue

Exploring How We Teach

• Mathematics Graduate Teaching Assistants (GTAs) play a large role in the socialization of undergraduate students of Color and thus have an impact on their sense of belonging and retention in the STEM fields.
• GTAs occupy a unique role as agents of mathematics socialization, as they are also undergoing their own socialization as doctoral students; in many ways, these roles and this socialization processes constrain GTAs in ways that can be detrimental and marginalizing to students of Color.
• Without being aware of the ways in which systemic racism and white supremacy operate in mathematics spaces, GTAs play a role in upholding …

Teacher As Student: Matters Of Exploration And Radical Vulnerability In The Classroom, Elizabeth Giardina

Exploring How We Teach

• GSIs can find pedagogical value in demonstrating an exploratory learning process, and, in sharing the partialities that come with that process, we can find opportunities for our own intellectual development and well-being.
• Radical vulnerability is a powerful tool for building a community of responsibility and care.
• Acts of transparent vulnerability can reframe course content as relevant to students’ broader lives, while also modeling a method of community- and self-care.

Validating Students' Diverse Identities, Erin Hughes

Exploring How We Teach

• Recognizing and appreciating students’ identities is important for learning and feelings of academic empowerment.
• The ways in which we can amplify students feeling validated is by being responsive to their needs and respecting who they are both inside and outside the classroom.
• The ways students may feel invalidated are by perpetuating the power dynamics between student and teacher, disregarding students’ mental health, and engaging in inflexible standards.
• Students may feel more able to take on the difficulties of academia when we help them take a strengths-based approach to who they are.

Nothing About Us Without Us: Practical Strategies For Accessible Pedagogy, Jennie Baker, Heath J. Wooten

Exploring How We Teach

• This chapter explores practical strategies based on the lived experiences of the authors, who are disabled graduate instructors.
• Theoretical approaches to accessible pedagogy should be rooted in praxis that accounts for the material realities of the disabled people it professes to be for.
• Most classroom interventions at present are accommodations, which are based on the medical model of disability; this chapter describes an approach to accessible pedagogy rooted in the social model of disability, and an ethics of disability justice.
• Instructors can explore ways of implementing accessible praxis by rethinking the ableist assumptions inherent in such areas as time, space, …

Graduate Teaching Communities Of Practice: Fostering A Sense Of Belonging And Professional Development For Graduate Students, By Graduate Students, April Athnos, Tianyi Kou-Herrema, Matthew Langley, Emile Oshima, Harrison Parker, Hima Rawal, Olivia Wilkins, Alexandra Lee, Seth Hunt, Ellen Searle, Nathalie Marinho

Exploring How We Teach

• Communities of Practice provide explicit formal recognition for teaching work and serve as a network of pedagogical resources.
• Communities of Practice create a safe space and a strengthened sense of community.
• Communities of Practice can be formed anywhere to meet any set of needs but always thrive with members’ agency and institutional support.

Don't Forget To Breathe: Advice For Coping With Graduate Teaching Anxiety, Ryan Cheek

Exploring How We Teach

• Graduate teaching anxiety is a unique form of communication apprehension.
• Ignore your overactive amygdala. Teaching will not kill you.
• Teach with empath. Students are more afraid of you than you are of them.
• Don’t forget to breathe. A hospitable atmosphere is key to successful teaching.
• Institutions should better support their graduate student instructors.

Community-Engaged Teaching: Opportunities And Challenges For Graduate Instructors, Stacy Bluth

Exploring How We Teach

• Community-engaged teaching can help alleviate the lack of relevance and isolation many graduate students experience.
• Graduate instructors using community-engaged teaching need to be particularly mindful of how they can find mentors, build equitable partnerships, and transform their community-engaged teaching into scholarship.

Navigating Evidence And Knowledge Equity, J. Nick Fisk

Exploring How We Teach

• Graduate instructors are awkwardly situated in the academy, which shapes their agency in teaching effectively and developing their own teaching practice.
• Evidence is a potentially fraught construct that is nonetheless necessary and accepted in the academy and can be leveraged in lieu of the often-wanting personal authority of graduate instructors to advocate better teaching practices while also developing themselves professionally.
• Principles of knowledge equity, which is foundationed on a pluralistic epistemological approach to knowledge building, can guide graduate instructors to consider a more expansive view and contextual approach to evidence to better serve students.
• Adoption of evidence-supported practices in the …

Practicing And Researching Pedagogical Metacognition: Benefits For Graduate Instructors During The First Year Of Instruction, Audrey Tocco

Exploring How We Teach

While reading this chapter, graduate student instructors will be able to:

• Define, identify, and explain the benefits of pedagogical metacognition.
• Understand a graduate student instructor’s experience with pedagogical metacognition in a learning community and how it enhanced her reflective and reflexive practices.
• Learn strategies to implement pedagogical metacognition in instruction.

Introduction: Strengthening Graduate Student Teaching Through Community-Based Knowledge Sharing, Sam Clem

Exploring How We Teach

This book combines the knowledge of 30 graduate student instructors sharing about how they teach and how they’ve learned how to teach.

How Can Graduate Instructors Promote Diversity, Equity, And Inclusion In Their Courses?, Taneisha Vilma, Natalie Low

Exploring How We Teach

In this chapter, readers will find

• Strategies to include Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion practices when designing the course syllabus.
• Considerations for fostering equity among students through the format and scoring of course assessments.
• Methods to include diverse cultures and contexts in course materials to increase representation.
• Strategies for promoting Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in various components of a course by graduate instructors who have different levels of course autonomy.

Teaching For Black Girls: What Every Graduate Student Instructor Can Learn From Balck Girlhood Studies, Theresa Hice-Fromille

Exploring How We Teach

• The neoliberal university undervalues teaching and upholds standardization practices that reproduce harm towards marginalized students. Black Studies approaches to education challenge these education standards.
• Teaching for Black girls is a pedagogical approach derived from Black Girlhood Studies in which the instructor commits to engage students as their co-creator, co-witness, and co-conspirator.
• All graduate student instructors can implement curricular tools and instill pedagogical values, such as instructor responsibility, student agency, collaboration, and reflexivity, to engage a practice of teaching for Black girls. In so doing, instructors model behaviors that promote Black girl thriving within and beyond the classroom.
• Instructors in STEM …

Teaching To Fail: Creating Vulnerable Learning Communities To Facilitate Students' Growth, Avaneesh Narla

Exploring How We Teach

• In today’s academic environment, students perceive no room for failure. Thus, they do not explore or take risks, and this limits their growth. As a result, the instructor must create opportunities for failure while mitigating the stress associated with failure.
• Opportunities for failure can be created in the curriculum and course structure through scaffolding, formative assessments, and extensive feedback. The instructor must also adopt a growth mindset when it comes to the students’ abilities.
• Instructors can create an environment where failure is expected by being vulnerable in the classroom themselves and highlighting their failures and subsequent growth. Graduate students are …

Collaborative Research: Developing Advanced Magnesium Electrolytes Toward Low Cost, High Energy Density Mg Batteries, Tianbiao Liu

Funded Research Records

No abstract provided.

Planttracker: An R Package To Translate Maps Of Plant Occurrence Into Demographic Data, Alice E. Stears, Peter B. Adler, Shannon E. Albeke, David H. Atkins, Jared Studyvin, Daniel C. Laughlin

Wildland Resources Faculty Publications

1. Long-term demographic data are rare yet invaluable for conservation, management, and basic research on the underlying mechanisms of population and community dynamics. Historical and contemporary mapped datasets of plant location and basal area present a relatively untapped source of demographic records that, in some cases, span over 20 years of sequential data collection. However, these maps do not uniquely mark individual plants, making the process of collecting growth, survival, and recruitment data difficult.
2. Recent efforts to translate historical maps of plant occurrence into shapefiles make it possible to use computer algorithms to track individuals through time and determine individual growth …

A Complete Receiver For A Multi-H Continuous Phase Frequently Shift Keyed Signal In The Presence Of Doppler, Brendan Hill, Nazia Mozaffar, Salwan Damman

Small Satellite Conference

In the absence of signal imperfections other than the presence of additive white Gaussian (AWGN) noise, Continuous Phase Frequency Shift Keyed (CPFSK) signals with a changing modulation index (referred to in the literature as "multi-h") will have only a few possible starting and end phases at each symbol interval. This allows them to be represented in a trellis diagram where they inherently possess coding gain that can be realized with a Viterbi decoder. However, with a low earth orbit altitude small satellite exhibiting a large time-varying Doppler, the Viterbi decoder fails to maintain this coding gain advantage if the receiver …

Full-Metal Reflectarray For Space Applications, Gautier Mazingue, Louis Mangenot, Ksenia Sharshavina, Maxime Romier, Nicolas Capet

Small Satellite Conference

This paper proposes a new full-metal unit cell for reflectarray antenna for space applications. It can be scaled to operate from X-band to Ka-band with the same manufacturing process. In this paper, An X-band 3-panel reflectarray for small satellite has been designed in this paper. The reflectarray has been simulated on the [8-8.4] GHz band and shows a good stability on the band. The maximum gain is 28 dB and the half-power beamwidth is 8°.

Creating The Jacd2 Central Support Structure – The Ndsa Transport Layer, Frank Turner

Small Satellite Conference

No abstract provided.

First Demonstration Of A Post-Quantum Key-Exchange With A Nanosatellite, Simon Burkhardt, Willi Meier, Christoph F. Wildfeuer, Ayesha Reezwana, Tanvirul Islam, Alexander Ling

Small Satellite Conference

We demonstrate a post-quantum key-exchange with the nanosatellite SpooQy-1 in low Earth orbit using Kyber-512, a lattice-based key-encapsulation mechanism and a round three finalist in the NIST PQC standardization process. Our firmware solution runs on an on-board computer that is based on the Atmel AVR32 RISC microcontroller, a widely used platform for nanosatellites. We uploaded the new firmware with a 436.2 MHz UHF link using the CubeSat Space Protocol (CSP) and performed the steps of the key exchange in several passes over Switzerland. The shared secret key generated in this experiment could potentially be used to encrypt RF links with …

Implementing The New Ccsds Housekeeping Data Compression Standard 124.0-B-1 (Based On Pocket+) On Ops-Sat-1, David Evans, Georges Labrèche, Dominik Marszk, Sam Bammens, Miguel Hernández-Cabronero, Vladimir Zelenevskiy, Vasundhara Shiradhonkar, Milenko Starcik, Maximilian Henkel

Small Satellite Conference

The number of telemetry parameters available in a typical spacecraft is constantly increasing. At the same time, the bandwidth available to download all that information is rather static. Operators must therefore make hard choices between which parameters to downlink or not, in which different situations, and at which sampling rates. This tradeoff is more problematic for missions with higher communication latency beyond LEO. Since 2009, The European Space Agency’s European Space Operations Center (ESA/ESOC) has been promoting the compression of housekeeping telemetry as a solution to this problem. Most spacecraft housekeeping telemetry parameters compress extremely well if they are pre-processed …

Cosmic Radiation Reduced Photo-Thermal Dispersion In Silicon Micro-Ring Resonators, Lorry Chang, Dun Mao, Hwaseob Lee, Tingyi Gu, Anthony W. Yu, Michael A. Krainak, Po Dong

Small Satellite Conference

We show post-spaceflight results for a silicon photonic integrated circuit micro-ring resonator. The free-carrier lifetime reduced by factor of 2 after radiation damage events in space.

Catsat: A 6u Inflatable Antenna Technology Demonstration Mission, Aman Chandra, Terrance Pat, Christopher Walker

Small Satellite Conference

This paper describes the design, development and flight testing of a half-meter spherical membrane reflector antenna built out of reflective and clear Mylar segments. A custom-built line feed optimized for operation at 10.5 GHz is used for spherical correction. The antenna system has been jointly developed by the University of Arizona and FreeFall Aerospace, Inc as primary payload to be demonstrated on-orbit on the University of Arizona’s 6U LEO mission CATSAT, nominally scheduled to launch no earlier than September 2022. The launch is a part of NASA’s CSLI program. The mission has been designed for a low earth sun-synchronous orbit. …

Performance Evaluation Of Silicon Mach-Zehnder Modulator After Cosmic Radiation To Enable Small Satellite Laser Communication, Dun Mao, Lorry Chang, Tiantian Li, Hwaseob Lee, Tingyi Gu, Anthony W. Yu, Michael A. Krainak, Serhat Altunc, Po Dong

Small Satellite Conference

To evaluate the performance change of Photonic integrated circuits after real cosmic radiation, silicon Mach-Zehnder Modulators were mounted on International Space Station on Low Earth Orbit for 6 months’ radiation harshness. Measured data of the device before and after radiation showed the permanent change of the effective index (around 10^-3), the reduced carrier recombination lifetime, and the extended high speed bandwidth.

Mission Operations, Cubed: Nasa Marshall Operations Support For Smallsats, Darren S. Wallace, Sam Digesu, Clifton Jones, Geoff Lochmaier, David Hitt

Small Satellite Conference

SmallSats have come a long way since the Huntsville Operations Support Center (HOSC) at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center supported its first “minisatellite” mission in 2010. And just as SmallSats themselves have evolved in those 12 years, so too has the HOSC’s mission support for SmallSats. Marshall Space Flight Center has a long history with payload and mission operations, including support for the Apollo missions to the moon, the Space Shuttle program, and 21 years of continuous around-the-clock science operations support for research aboard the International Space Station. Today, the HOSC is a multi-tenant facility, supporting not only ISS, but …

Reconnaissance And Documentation, Terra Gordon, Richard Harold, Cayli Farias, Logan Hill, Sharik Joseph, Julia Kjenstad, Michael Lauber, Dakota Ross, Dominick Uzzardo

Small Satellite Conference

The Reconnaissance and Documentation (RAD) project aims to be a Low Earth Orbit (LEO) based satellite that will utilize image recognition and optical remote sensing technology to target countries currently experiencing Stage Seven or higher on the United Nations’ Ten Stages of Genocide. Once a target is located, the Leza satellite will capture images and downlink to a ground station based in Prescott, Arizona. These images will be processed internally and then reviewed before being sent to the United Nations and mainstream media outlets to assist in providing the legal evidence needed for the conviction of war criminals. The system …

Evaluation Of Parameter-Scaling For Efficient Deep Learning On Small Satellites, Calvin B. Gealy, Alan D. George

Small Satellite Conference

Parameter-scaling techniques change the number of parameters in a machine-learning model in an effort to make the network more amenable to different device types or accuracy requirements. This research compares the performance of two such techniques. NeuralScale is a neural architecture search method which claims to generate deep neural networks for devices that are resource-constrained. It shrinks a network to a target number of parameters by adjusting the width of layers independently to achieve a higher accuracy than previous methods. The novel NeuralScale algorithm is compared to the baseline uniform scaling of MobileNet-style models, where the width of each layer …

3ucubed: The Imap Student Collaboration Cubesat Project, Sanjeev Mehta, Noé Lugaz, Lindsay Bartolone, Marc Lessard, Jenna Burgett, Laura Peticolas, Lynn Cominsky, Marcus Jernigan, Alfred, Sonya Smith

Small Satellite Conference

The 3UCubed project is a 3U CubeSat being jointly developed by the University of New Hampshire, Sonoma State University, and Howard University as a part of the NASA Interstellar Mapping and Acceleration Probe (IMAP)¹ student collaboration. This project consists of a multidisciplinary team of undergraduate students from all three universities. The mission goal of the 3UCubed is to understand how Earth's polar upper atmosphere (‘the thermosphere’ in Earth’s auroral regions) responds to particle precipitation and solar wind forcing and internal magnetospheric processes.

3UCubed includes two instruments with rocket heritage to achieve the science mission: an ultraviolet photomultiplier tube (UV-PMT) …

Democratizing Access To Space: Kube Platform For Cubesat, Minsik Lee, Naeem Altaf

Small Satellite Conference

We live in an environment where interest in space is hotter than ever, and new emerging technologies related to space are introduced daily. Now, space has come to have a close relationship with our real lives, not our imagination. There are already various services such as GPS and satellite-based communication services, and now humans are trying to extend the range of mankind beyond the moon to Mars.

However, despite these efforts, there are still many obstacles to space access. Space has really only been accessible to well-resourced nation-states, organizations, and the super-wealthy.

Our vision and goal for this mission was, …