Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Hello, everyone. I'm Mike Simmons, the founder of Astronomy for Equity. Welcome to the podcast. Today we have Taisia Karasova from Ukraine. Now, Taisi is now studying at MIT in the United States. She is a sophomore physics major, but she has an important work that she has been doing in Ukraine that we're going to talk about based on astronomy, and it'll be interesting to see why Astronomy during wartime and so on. So welcome. Taisia.
[00:00:34] Speaker B: Hi.
[00:00:35] Speaker A: Thanks for taking the time to join us here. And this is going to be very interesting, really. People hear about Ukraine and the difficulties, but you're working on things that are much more than that, that there are good things going on there and that are maybe even more important during wartime now. So you started Astra Sandbox, which is a great name. Tell us what Astro Sandbox is for and what you do.
[00:01:03] Speaker B: Yeah, so I had an idea of kind of some project like this when I studied in high school because I personally liked resources and community where I could study advanced astronomy, exchange some ideas with others, and help each other in studies. Therefore, I really wanted to create such a space. Following examples I observed in Math Community and Physics Community, I wanted to create such a space which would unite study resources and people.
Therefore, like the main goal of Astro Sandbox is to give a sense of community to high school students who are interested in astronomy and give them resources to study advanced astronomy. We give. We do this in a branch of ways. We have regular, like webinars, we have clubs, we have astronomy tournament, we have social media interaction with them and a lot of other things where people study and find combiners.
[00:02:16] Speaker A: And when did you start astra sandbox?
[00:02:19] Speaker B: In January 2020, on my gap year between high school and first year in college.
[00:02:28] Speaker A: So this is before the war started?
[00:02:31] Speaker B: Yes, this is two years and one month exactly before the full scale invasion.
January 24, 2020.
[00:02:42] Speaker A: Well, we'll talk about how things have changed in Ukraine since that time, but we have some things to share here, so let's take a look. Well, okay, so I recognize this high school, college, but that's not where this is from in this case.
[00:03:00] Speaker B: Yes. Like, this picture is a screenshot of a lesson in Quanta Club, which Astro Sandbox ran for middle schoolers. Basically, what kids do there is they learn through problem solving different parts of astronomy through, like, through the school year. They cover all different topics, from instrumentation and spherical geometry to extragalactic astrophysics, basics of cosmology, of stellar evolution, and many, many other topics. They learn this through so solving problems. It's not like Science, popular stuff. It's a bit more advanced. And in this club we teach middle schoolers like the basic math they need to solve these problems and then basically how to, how to approach astronomy with this mathematical apparatus. And particularly here you can see this was the one of first lessons in a group of 8th and 9th graders where they studied second order curves, this particularly about an ellipse. And they studied particularly in this lesson they studied geometry of an ellipse. But yeah, this is just one example. And through the school year they cover many, many other topics.
[00:04:22] Speaker A: So this spherical geometry in middle school involves geometry, trigonometry, algebra.
This is not normal middle school stuff.
[00:04:34] Speaker B: Yes, that's why we teach them a bit of math before getting to astronomy part of it. And we also try to illustrate for instance the spherical geometry moment of objects on the sky. You can use Stellarium to illustrate it because you can speed up the time, show how earth rotation influences what we see on the sky. So we find approaches to kids and this project particularly this club is already 2 1/2 years old and it's absolutely free of charge, so anyone can join. The only requirement is to do homework.
[00:05:17] Speaker A: And attend classes for those who aren't, who don't have the math background at that age. You have qualitative things where they can understand the concepts as well.
[00:05:27] Speaker B: Yes, but we still try to teach math to kids so they have necessary math skills. And usually if we see that something is like too difficult, then we can correct it for the next year syllabus and okay, this is like too much for them and like simplify it, make more qualitative than quantitative.
[00:05:50] Speaker A: Yeah, this is interesting. A little messy. What, what is happening here?
[00:05:56] Speaker B: Yeah, this is another thing we do. It's not like a study process. This is a competition called Astrophytes. We launched it in 2020 and have held it for four times so far. This tournament is a few days long.
Four, four days long. In the beginning of each day, each team which competes within the tournament gets a problem set of six problems on advanced astronomy and try to solve them for a couple of hours, up to five. After that they meet with another team which have been solving the same problem set for the same amount of time. And then they defend their solutions in front of each other, try to find problems, try to find mistakes in their opponent solution and receive points both for their solutions and mistakes they found in their opponent solutions. And every day they receive a new problem set and meet a new team. So this involves a lot of exchange of ideas and I'm glad that through this tournament we can reach kids in a lot of Ukrainian regions. Usually we have kids from 15, about 15 Ukrainian regions. So we have a lot of exchange going on there. And this is one of tools that we use to bring people together and allow them find commanders.
[00:07:22] Speaker A: So Astro fights.
That's okay. I've heard a lot of Astro things, but having this celestial battle going on between the teams, I never heard of that one before. Where they try to find faults in the others solutions as well as finding their own.
[00:07:43] Speaker B: Yeah. This is not the format we created in Ukraine. This format is used for math competitions. And I took part in it and I saw how fascinating it is and I wanted to adopt it and to astronomy and what we managed to do and ran this tournament for four years already.
[00:08:05] Speaker A: That's incredible. That's wonderful. That's got to be a lot of fun.
[00:08:09] Speaker B: Yeah. And a lot of work.
[00:08:11] Speaker A: And a lot of work. Good work.
[00:08:14] Speaker B: Yeah. Because we have to create problems ourselves for this tournament.
[00:08:18] Speaker A: And it isn't just online. You have these in real life sometimes.
[00:08:25] Speaker B: Here we make this tournament online to make sure that everyone can access it. Especially take into account that a lot of kids are now scattered all over the Europe.
So we want to gather more audience. So we hold this tournament online. The part of the tournament which is offline, which we try to do, is the award ceremony. Here is the picture From Award Ceremony 2023. The award ceremony was held in the Institute of Aerospace Technologies. Usually we have sponsors which help us and send us valuable prizes like paper constructor of telescopes, some maybe space puzzles and other valuable merch so we can give valuable prizes to our participants, which I also enjoy. Like this part of the tournament, we show that we cherish them and we are thankful for their time that took them to take part. And it's. It's hard tournament. It's definitely hard tournament. And it's like international level Olympiad. So that's like that it takes a lot of courage to decide to take part.
[00:09:41] Speaker A: I'll bet. Yeah. Yeah. But you do provide these resources. Yes. Screens.
[00:09:47] Speaker B: This is the problems archive we did for the first time in like in history of Ukrainian Olympiads. The first. The first screenshot shows a part of archive of Ukrainian Olympiads problems.
Like second stage is district level, four stage is national level and we have more like selection for international Olympians and so on. So this is an archive for everyone, starting from beginners and ending with really advanced high schoolers who want to take part in really international competitions. Everyone can find something here to practice. And we gathered this for the first time in the history of Ukrainian and international Olympiads in other countries. Because before this archive was launched, all these competitions were scattered all over the Internet. And now they're all in one place. And we know that this archive is used abroad as well, not only in Ukraine, because we got like sent full notes from other countries during International Olympiads for this archive.
[00:10:58] Speaker A: And these International Olympiads in astronomy, I don't think that's something I've heard about in the United States. I know it's very popular in a lot of other countries, but tell us just briefly about these things.
[00:11:13] Speaker B: Yeah. So a lot of countries have their own national Olympics, which are usually they start from district level and national level, and you pass from next level only if you are successful in the previous one. And when you reach like national level and you feel performed there really good, then you can qualify for international level. Usually you have to pass additional qualification rounds. In Ukraine we have from 10 to 14 additional qualification rounds which you write during like from one week to 10 days. After that, if you are qualified and you go to this event, mainly this event, for instance, International Olympiad on Astronomy and Astrophysics, it gather kids who are interested in astronomy and who are the best astronomers in their countries, since they all pass through all these qualification rounds. Yeah, they may be easier or more difficult in some countries than in others, but generally kids who go there are most, most qualified astronomers, young astronomers in their country. And they compete with each other. Right. Like in theoretical astronomy, in data analysis and observations.
And of course have a lot of fun exchanging and networking at those. Those events. Usually Astronomy Olympiads gather about from 50 to 60 countries.
[00:12:29] Speaker A: I'm sure that the resources you have and the activities you have brings more students into astronomy because of the opportunities you have, which is great. And then you have things like this that might scare them right back out again. If this is middle school, I think you said that this is.
[00:12:48] Speaker B: This is more high school or other. Yeah, like today I already talked about Quenta Club on the beginning. This is like the Quanta Club is the club for like with zagreal meetings with homework and stuff. Picture which are shown now. This is from our webinar. We have been recording webinars for four years already since basically since the start of the project. It was the first thing we started to do when we launched the project. Webinars cover different astronomy topics again, from spherical trigonometry and time to celestial mechanics, extragalactic astrophysics, physics of stars, then cosmology. Here we. Here we try to dive a bit into this because it's like not high school material at all. Also we have recorded webinars on like solar system instrumentation and a lot of. A lot of topics. We have recorded 72 in total. The point about these webinars is that they are advanced. So this is advanced astronomy. This is not like really school material, but high schooler with strong math and physics background should be able to understand. And these are not like regular lessons with homework. These are things we just upload to the Internet and anyone can access them at any time.
We do publish homework for practice, but it's not like something where we have students, where we have. We check homework and stuff like this. We just upload these videos, presentations, homeworks and solutions for people to practice. And anyone can access them at any point of time on our website. On our website. There is a webinars folder on our website and it's accessible. Unfortunately it's only in Ukrainian, but we think to start recording some of them in English.
[00:14:48] Speaker A: So you have things in other ways as well. Something more familiar to most of us. Although this is not directly Astro sandbox I think. Or is it?
[00:14:58] Speaker B: Yes, yes, this is. Besides doing a lot of other stuff, like we ran two clubs, one for Quanta for middle schoolers. We also run a club for high school students and college students. We have these webinars, we have tournaments and we have problem archive which we try to keep up to date. We also, during the war we act as a like intermediate step between people from Europe and the US who want to help Ukraine and Ukraine students.
Ukrainian students are Ukrainian teachers because sometimes people want to help Ukraine but they don't know any Ukrainians and know where to start. So they can contact us and we can connect them with appropriate people. For instance, this what happened between us and UNI Stellar company, Frank Merke is the head of the company, wanted to give this like smart portable telescopes which have inbuilt image processing to like Ukrainian teachers who can use them in outreach and maybe like simple research projects. And what I did is I found four universities, one with in Kiev, in Odessa and in Kriveri who really need these telescopes. Because like for instance Odessa, they do not have access to the observatory right now because it's on the near the river, it's dangerous during the war and Kiev, as far as I know, they just like modern equipment for students. And so we were able to connect universities with unistellar and we managed this process of telescopes sending from France to Ukraine. Unfortunately we had some problems on the border due to polish like blockage by Polish farmers. And it took us like a couple of months instead of like one week to go through border, but telescopes finally reached the universities.
[00:17:05] Speaker A: And that's good here. Looks like a regular classroom. What's happening there?
[00:17:11] Speaker B: Yeah, like, while most of things Astro Sandbox does is online webinars, clubs, tournaments, we also want to go to and speak in person with kids interested in astronomy. So what we do is we visit different cities with these lessons. Every lesson is a few hours long, of course, with breaks. And during this lesson we gather like some kids and talk to them about astronomy in a way that is understandable to them, but also which is not purely science popular. So we involve some high school math. For instance, on this lecture, which is shown in this picture, they talked about measuring distances and masses in astronomy, different methods that were used. And through this they were.
They had the opportunity to be involved in different parts of astronomy because measuring distances covers a lot of stuff, like from parallax to supernova and like cosmology.
So this is what, what we covered during this lecture.
And this is the, like this also. This picture is also from such a lecture, this lecture in Mykolaiv, which is a quite dangerous city. So I'm really glad our lecturers were able to go there. And basically what's the. What I really like even more about these lectures is that both, both lecturers who were shown on this picture, on the. And on the previous pictures, they gave lectures in their hometowns. So they, when they studied in school, they had some like Olympiad experience. Then they found Astro Sandbox. They became a part of a team. They learned in Astro Sandbox and then they go back to their hometowns and share their knowledge. This is, I think, really valuable.
[00:19:07] Speaker A: Is this all volunteer do you have?
[00:19:10] Speaker B: Yes, yes.
Although we do have some sponsors who can cover like costs, travel costs and like food. But not. We do not earn through that. We just cover the expenses. So we do not spend money on this, but we also do not earn anything. So we have net zero.
[00:19:31] Speaker A: You've also studied in the Netherlands. I lived there for a while and now in the United States. Would you say astronomy is more popular in Ukraine? Because it really. There seems to be quite a bit going on, a lot of volunteers available for this, these activities.
[00:19:47] Speaker B: Yeah, I think Olympiads are in generally really popular in Ukraine because that's the way you can express yourself if you express your talent, if your talent is in stem. So it's not only about astronomy. And it seems that Olympiads are way more popular in Ukraine than in the Netherlands or in The US I do not know specifically why it happened to be so maybe it's like a bit of like leftover from UC Sur, where like competitions were really, really important.
[00:20:22] Speaker A: And this a team at an Olympia?
[00:20:27] Speaker B: Yes, this is an international Olympian Astronomy and astrophysics for juniors. Astro Sandbox actually takes part in preparing kids for this Olympia as well. So although this event is does not is not connected to Astro Sandbox, this is an international Olympiad. But we do help to prepare Ukrainian team and we're glad that kids still participate. Our kids, kids from Ukraine still participate, despite all the difficulties they have with preparation, with transportation and especially previous year there were problems with electricity, power outages were really, really often. And this is just. We are glad that they can make it to the Olympiads and we helped them with preparation.
[00:21:15] Speaker A: And speaking of power outages, this is taken from a Washington Post article it was prepared for.
And this shows three large cities in Ukraine before and after the war began. So clearly there's a lot of difficulty in many of these cities, Kiev being the capital of the country. Has this made a difference in the popularity of astronomy that you've seen or in the importance of it? Because really, you know, especially on this podcast, I think it's why astronomy, why do we use it? How does it have an impact? So what, what have you seen since the war began?
[00:21:57] Speaker B: Well, in my surroundings, people have always been interested in astronomy. So for me it's. I may be a bit biased when speaking about how it generally changed, but as I think when there is such extreme conditions like the war, for instance, it's really important to focus on some routine stuff. Actually, this is described in a book, yes to Life, about surviving in a consideration camp. Basically, of course, we cannot draw like the direct parallels, but what the author tells there, Victor Frankel, what he tells is that it's important to survive in such extreme conditions to focus on routing stuff. For instance, in our case, this can be studied for kids in school, university. This is studying and study, improve your skills and work on your future.
And this is why study resources are especially important during the war, because they allow to switch your attention from oh my God, such a lot of harsh things are going around me to do some things that you can control your skills, your knowledge. And also as you previously told me during power outages, which were especially a thing in the previous year, is that the light pollution is. The level of light pollution is really low. So we can actually see a lot of things which are not seen during usual time with telescopes. So this is my opinion why astronomy in particular, becomes more popular during the war.
[00:23:47] Speaker A: You know, that raises the point, too, that what we've done in astronomy for equity, and again, this is what brought us together, too, was a request because of the lack of light pollution at certain times because of the power outages from astronomy students that were being aided in their schools by a colleague Earthlings hub, that was bringing and is bringing computers, laptops, and other resources to the schools. And the astronomy students said, well, you know, it's dark here a lot of the times. We need telescopes. And because of that, we.
We had a crowdfunding campaign to bring telescopes to them. And I will share this.
Yeah, this was the campaign that we had, and we were able to get a few telescopes to go to the schools. Of course, it was very expensive to get them and send them, but this is what we did. And we shared some of the pictures that you gave us from the Olympiad and other situations there.
I have some pictures from that as well. So now I want to talk about what a difference it has made. And here we have one of the telescopes arriving. Many, many months it took to arrange for this without exorbitant cost to get them to Ukraine.
Getting in and out of Ukraine and getting things in and out of Ukraine is difficult these days because of the war. But here's one arriving in the city of Vinici, I believe.
[00:25:22] Speaker B: I think.
[00:25:23] Speaker A: Okay.
And another. And the students. And you can see there are different ages. The others were younger. These are older ones. And getting it together and reading the manual. Good luck with that. We always make sure that there's somebody there who's expert in telescopes, because it's a steep learning curve if you're not familiar with it. So all the programs that I've done, we've always vetted this to make sure they're going to be used and. But they're doing it themselves. But the teacher, who has some experiences there, this is another one that was sent, and the kids checking it out to see what this is all about.
What. What is the imports. I mean, we've talked about that some, but now we have younger kids that are getting into it there as well. One of the people I talked to, I don't know if you know, Hershey's with unicef, she's a psychologist, started an NGO there to help the children there. And she said that they. That it's been really difficult for the students, that they have sort of lost hope. And at your level, too, the students, the high schoolers, are looking ahead to their futures and the hope that they had before A couple of years ago, they're now finding is they're not as hopeful that there's a path forward for them in their country, whether or not they can leave the country, whether or not they can be successful. So what is. What has this been like for the students? You've seen change over the last several years. How do the activities that Astro Sandbox does and that Astronomy for Equities does in bringing telescopes? How does that impact that?
[00:27:14] Speaker B: I think that for most of students, the ongoing war is, of course, a general stress which is not going away anywhere. And of course it influences your ability to study, first of all, even if you're not affected in a material way, let's phrase it like this. But of course, also a lot of people are like, losing some kind of income or even homes or loved ones. And of course, this all influences the level of opportunities you have.
Specifically in my bubble, I think a lot of kids, they are more focused on just surviving, like, I mean, mentally maybe adapting to a new environment if they had to flee Ukraine. And of course, it's harder for them to study astronomy in depth as in depth studies of astronomy is what Astro Sandbox mainly focuses on.
What I think Astro Sandbox and Astronomy for Equity do for them is to bring something that reminds of peace, that it exists somewhere. And the war is not the only part of their lives. There is something else to do and something else to focus on. And this is, of course, extremely important to switch your attention and to spend your mental resources not on just processing news, but also spend them on something really beneficial for yourself. For either. In the case of Astronomy for Equity, it's more about observations about telescopes. In our case, it's more about problem solving, but still it's about switching attention and helping them to bring something peaceful to their lives, something like a ground to stand on of usual things they have to help mentally survive in the surroundings that they have.
[00:29:32] Speaker A: And it's interesting they use the term to ground themselves, to be grounded by looking into space. It almost sounds contradictory in a way. Maybe it's an escape, but, you know, that's true for all of us. When we go into nature, we escape from the other things that might be causing us stress. The sky, of course, is part of nature, and it's a very big part. Being connected with others is helpful. I've started programs and done projects where people are connected through astronomy, which is the same everywhere, and it ties us all together, regardless of the situation there, the culture, the language, clothing, whatever it is.
And the idea came up last year after doing our program to crowdfunding program to get these telescopes to the students there of my visiting Ukraine to actually meet them in person. And I felt, I was very concerned. I said well, you know, I don't want to take anybody away from what they need to do and I don't want to be a burden. And this was the NGO that was talking about maybe hosting us there. But it turned out it was very important. And so I'm hoping that this spring I will be visiting some of these students as well as some of the students. As part of Astro Sandbox we have a cosmologist who wants to go along, a documentary filmmaker who would like to record this to and show the importance of it. But you know, I was a little reluctant that maybe this is not what they need is the burden of some visitors coming. But they're actually very anxious to meet those from the outside and be connected with other people in astronomy.
[00:31:21] Speaker B: In some ways I think that they are, they would be glad to see other people because when we started discussing this topic like traveling of your group and I explained a bit about this idea in Astro Sandbox Telegram channel, which is the main platform where we interact with our audience, I told them that there will be like a group of astronomy enthusiasts from the U.S. visiting and what kind of topics would you like to discuss with them? Just like to see what, what they're interested in. And I had a lot of, a lot of responses from all over Ukraine. Mainly what they said is just any astronomy topics, but this is the topic I like. Most any astronomy topics are suitable. So I think that definitely there are people who would like to, to have such visitors and we can help. Astro Sandbox can help with organizing events where we have our team in dead cities like Kreuverich, maybe Odessa, Michaelaev, Kiev, Ivana Frankivsk. But we have to discuss it in advance, of course.
[00:32:40] Speaker A: Well, I'm glad that I have a cosmologist that wants to go along because I won't be able to answer these students questions when it comes to cosmology. So I'm going to need an expert in that and other things. And I'm looking forward to this. Really hope that this happens this spring as planned and sharing it with people in the US and other countries about what the reality is, both the difficulties you face, but even more important, the opportunities and the good things that there are astronomy helps to bring as well. So we will have a follow up on this afterwards and maybe you'll, you'll be back in Ukraine visiting. I'll get to see you there.
[00:33:26] Speaker B: I will be in August because I am going to Socorro in New Mexico to do observations, a national radio astronomy observatory for my summer experience.
[00:33:36] Speaker A: Oh, that's great. Yeah. Socorro, New Mexico in the summer is interesting.
It's a desert. You know, it's going to be hot but it'll be dry. So I think you, I think you'll like I mean that's a great opportunity. So. Okay. Well, I hope you to see you there. And I want to thank you, Taisi for taking your time to join us in telling us about astronomy in Ukraine.
One of the things that just doesn't come to mind first when you think about a country and what the students are going through there. But I think as in almost all situations, astronomy has something to add in a way to benefit people. So thank you very much for joining us.
[00:34:25] Speaker B: Thank you for invitation.
