I’m Laurie Orth and I am a music and STEAM educator. I write songs for elementary and middle school students about space exploration and rockets. I’m a nontraditional educator and teach as an independent contractor for the Jessye Norman School for the Arts, in Augusta, GA. I am part of their community outreach program and teach chorus at a small, Title 1 school, Challenge Prep Academy.
Dr. Amy Lowitz is a scientist in the Astronomy Department at the University of Arizona. She works on the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT), a global array of radio telescopes that work together to image and study supermassive black holes. Amy designs new hardware and systems to make EHT observing more efficient. She also oversees EHT observing at three of the EHT telescope sites: the South Pole Telescope, the Submillimeter Telescope, and the Kitt Peak 12m Telescope.
In July 2024 I had the opportunity to visit Amy in person in Arizona. In the vlog of my trip, I share pictures of the work one of Amy’s colleagues is doing on a telescope that is going in a hot air balloon in Antarctica, we visit Kitt Peak Observatory, which is built on the tribal land of the Tohono Odham nation, and then Amy’s lab at the University of Arizona. You will also hear snippets of the songs I wrote for our Polar STEAM resource assignment.
Participating in the Polar STEAM program has opened my eyes to new scientific disciplines and taught me about Antarctica. I have continued to watch documentaries about this continent, and I’ve purchased several Young Adult books about Antarctica, to help me prepare to introduce this material to my students and the broader population of educators who are reading this blog. One of the highlights of this collaboration has been talking about how Amy has made music at the South Pole Station, and then working on the lyrics creation in Amy’s office at the University of Arizona. I’m so happy we recorded ourselves singing the songs before I headed back home to Georgia. I treasure those audio files. I have also enjoyed getting into a professional recording studio to record the songs.
Stay tuned for some YouTube videos about how to share this information with your music specialist and collaborate for a Polar STEAM experience at your school.
I’ve been sharing info about the Polar STEAM program with students, telling them about scientists who do field research to study the planet, where the South Pole is, how it’s different than the North Pole, and that there are no polar bears at the South Pole. We have had discussions about DEI and the need for more female scientists and more scientists of color. I will introduce these songs to my students in January 2025 and lead them in student-centered activities so that they can write their own raps with this content, and perform and video themselves rapping about the South Pole Telescope and the Cosmic Microwave Background.
