Session 1 – ORALS

Africa has amazing potential due to natural (such as dark sky) and human resources for scientific research in astronomy and space science. At the same time, the continent is still facing many difficulties, and its countries are now recognizing the importance of astronomy, space science and satellite technologies for improving some of their main socio-economic and ecological challenges. The development of astronomy and space science in Africa has grown significantly over the past few years, and never before it was more possible to use astronomy for education, outreach, and development as it is now. However, much still remains to be done. This talk will summarise the recent developments in astronomy research and education in Africa and will focus on how working together on the development of science and education can we fight poverty in the long term and increase our possibilities of attaining the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals in future for benefit of all.

The National Schools’ Observatory (NSO) provides access to all schools in the UK and Ireland to the world’s largest robotic telescope, the Liverpool Telescope. The NSO is a well established astronomy education platform that has received over 200,000 observation requests to date. The website receives 1.5 million visitors a year and offers access to learning, activities, teacher resources and importantly GoObserving, the telescope interface. The Liverpool Telescope is both robotic and autonomous; providing schools the same access to the skies as professional astronomers. The autonomous nature of the telescope allows for young children to make requests eliminating the need to understand complex geometry. The connection to the Liverpool Telescope provides ‘real knowledge of a telescope’ that is important as a hook but also for the understanding of how we translate star light, to an image on our screen, to probe the nature of the universe. This gap is often missing from pictures found in textbooks and in the media. Users use a real scientific instrument to make their own observations to do real research, including contributing to the ongoing projects offered by the NSO. The NSOs early involvement in the design phase of the Liverpool Telescope was fundamental to its success, rather than having to cram into an observing strategy designed for only academic astronomers. Liverpool John Moores University is leading the design of the New Robotic Telescope (NRT), a 4m robotic telescope in a similar location on La Palma. The NRT provides new challenges, both in its physical engineering and also in data transfer. For the NSO, this gives us a chance to widen our educational activities, instead of being limited to traditional astronomy education methods, and engage students in wider STEM areas of engineering and computing. Our experiences with data in the world are more important than ever, with teaching being mostly delivered remotely and online over the summer semester in the UK. Data driven astronomy education is important to provide access to the universe for all, not just for future astronomers. The next generation of robotic telescope(s) planned for the future offer a unique opportunity to build in education, open and accessible to all.

Both for elementary and secondary education, a variety of topics on astronomy are considered as compulsory contents to be taught. Those comprise phenomena like day and night occurrence, seasons’ explanation, and the moon’s phases, among others. The poor comprehension of those basic concepts has been worldwide studied since many years ago. Being the persistence and coexistence of diverse mental models at the core of the difficulties to achieve significative learning. Within this scenario, we review the situation in our local (Argentinean) schools considering different angles. There have been previous works on the topic but we do consider an update as a mandatory milestone to visualize all the issues that need to be tackled, in order to consider consistent strategies. In this work, we classify the difficulties in two groups. The first of them comprises current education issues while the concern about future teachers constitute the second one. Current education not only faces the previously mentioned challenges but deals with a variety of resources of low quality, either because they replicate every-day conceptions or reinforce those by poor didactic transpositions. This was recently reported based on a survey on printed and media sources offered in Spanish at hand for students and teachers. At the same time, we observe that opening the instruction of all-ages students with the heliocentric explanation is detrimental to the correlation with every-day knowledge. Thus, it appears hard to put them in dialogue as it would be desired for achieving the long-term goal of debunking naïve representations. On the other hand, the topocentric perspective seems to offer a more tangible explanation with a closer relation to vivid experiences. At least that is our experience with elementary and secondary students, and school teachers both in pre-service and service stages. In this regard, if any change is to be observed in future education, we need to focus on those teachers that are conducting their training. In our interventions with the teachers in these latter stages, we observe a superficial (if any) understanding on those same topics that they are expected to teach. The lack of offer of clear and comprehensive good-quality resources, as well as courses or access to professionals of reference, limits the possibilities of the best-intentioned professionals who, in the best-case scenario, have to actively look for alternatives to overcome their own conscious limitations on the topic. We finally address some promising estrategies we have been involving in our own proposals for students and teachers. We share them in the belief that they can be valuable experiences for inspiring renewed alternatives to face old and new challenges in the area.

Youths and kids in Indonesia since almost two decades ago have been showing significant increase of interest in space sciences, especially astronomy. One of the main factors is due to the annual event of National Science Olympiad which includes Astronomy as the subject. The increasing level of public interest, especially younger generation on astronomical events, such as eclipses, moon sightings, meteor showers has been constantly observed from time to time. Being aware that Astronomy course does not included in primary and secondary education level’s curricula, teachers are somewhat desperate and are not capable to play role as clearing house in science related to space. The Network of Astronomy for School Education Network (NASE) workshop was started in 2017 in Machung University, East Java as the pilot project in Indonesia. The course has attracted significant interest from teachers and university staff, especially in East and Middle Java Provinces. Being confident with the enthusiasm of teachers who expressed that NASE workshop could fulfil their needs to teach and instruct students in a very efficient way, NASE workshops were organized consecutively at Bandar Lampung, Lampung Province in 2018 and 2019 (hosted by Institut Teknololgi Sumatera) and in 2020 at Bandung, West Java Province (hosted by Institut Teknologi Bandung). The most recent NASE workshop on 21-23 August 2020, conducted in on-line mode, was attended by 90 participants, although primarily aimed at 15 School teachers, and was quite successful. The on-line observational activity turned out to be the most impressive session for the participants. We report and review four years of IAU NASE workshops in Indonesia, with various documentation and brief analysis of the positive impact to the teachers and instructors attitude in teaching astronomy at secondary level of education.

With the arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic, virtual teaching of all courses was implemented at the Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos for the continuity of teaching. At the beginning it was seen as a great problem that forced them to develop skills for the continuity of teaching and research at the university. I will show the implementation of the virtual use of astronomical practice programs such as CLEA, data processing such as IRIS, AstroImageJ, C2A, etc. astronomical databases of international institutions that were freely opened, use of web applications on and finally I will show the results obtained in the last semester, the corrections to be made according to the experience obtained and the future cooperation plans between associations, astronomy clubs and research institutions for astronomical observation that will serve for future courses to be carried out.

El uso de la enseñanza virtual en los cursos de pregrado de astronomía

Con la llegada de la pandemia del COVID-19, en la Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos se implementó la enseñanza virtual de todos los cursos para la continuidad de la enseñanza. Al inicio se vio como un gran problema que hizo que se obliguen a desarrollar habilidades para la continuidad de la enseñanza e investigación en la universidad. Mostraré la implementación del uso virtual de programas de prácticas astronómicas como el CLEA, procesamiento de datos como IRIS, AstroImageJ, C2A, etc., Bases de datos astronómicos de instituciones internacionales que se aperturaron libremente, utilización de aplicaciones de la web sobre y finalmente mostraré los resultados obtenidos en el semestre último, las correcciones a realizar de acuerdo a la experiencia obtenida y los planes futuros de cooperación entre las asociaciones, clubes de astronomía e instituciones de investigación para la observación astronómica que sirva para los cursos futuros a realizar.

In Thailand, annually there are more than 50 high school students presenting in the Thai Astronomical Conference (Student Session) and more than 20 high school students joining research activities mentored by their teachers and NARIT staff through the «Advanced Teacher Training» scheme. These opportunities offer a unique experience for students to learn various skills through proposing a research question, design research methodologies, acquire different knowledge conducting research, present and communicate their results and response to criticism. Data collection for this qualitative research study is conducted through interviews with the senior high school students who completed their research presentations, with a control group of students who did not have research-based learning experience but had other informal learning experiences such as planetarium visit, or after school astronomy activities. The study looks into students’ learning behaviour, attitude towards science, skills acquired for other subjects, interest in science careers. Preliminary data are also collected for comparing students performance related to mentorship hours, access to resources, schooling environment for data simulation for a long term study in future events. Apart from the small sample data set, a big data set of the students who joined the programs over years also reveal their career path.