Session 2 – ORALS

High schools in Taiwan have been joining in global search for asteroids using Pan-STARRS images. Averaging one to two campaigns each year, students and teachers from different corners of the world, would learn the science behind the activity, techniques of image and data processing, skills in presentation, and most of all, the spirits of teamwork. Over the years, Taiwanese students triumphed a few unique discoveries. Here we share the experience of how each campaign would be organized before and after the event, and the lessons gained from the series to facilitate other educational exercises.

The regularities of the movement of the stars in the celestial vault, demonstrated the awareness that the natural world could be rationally understood, that there is an «order» and «rules» that govern it, and that knowledge of them to our most ancient ancestors, allowed the satisfaction of specific needs such as farming and fishing days. This cultural heritage on the role of astronomy to encourage the study of nature; It is usually used for non-formal education and the dissemination of science and technology. The Astronomical Society of the University of Carabobo (SAUC) is an activity of permanent scientific dissemination, which uses Astronomy as a tool for the scientific enculturation of the local population and non-formal teaching of Science and Technology; in the City of Valencia Venezuela for more than two decades. The Astronomical Society of the University of Carabobo (SAUC) brings together the University Community, the Center of Engineers of the Carabobo State, the Venezuelan Association for the Advancement of Sciences and the Associations of fans of Astronomy. The SAUC base their Learning activities through the cognitive theories of Gaston Bachelard and Edgar Morin, according to which the focus of the dissemination and popularization of Astronomy must focus on knowledge for life and on overcoming epistemic obstacles between knowledge expert and knowledge taught. For this reason, communication using Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) and discursive content focus on the didactic transposition of knowledge, avoiding the details of the rigor of metalanguage (mathematics); in the use of the Scientific spirit in the sense of Bacherlard’s Philosophy, and in astronomical observations accessible with amateur telescopes. As well as the astronomical events those are most linked to daily life, following Morin’s philosophy of Education for Life here and now. For this reason, SAUC’s activities are focused on holding Master Class, seminars, astronomy courses for amateurs; development of multimedia materials (videos, software, books, etc.) and in the production of national astronomical ephemeris. The qualitative evaluation, after two decades of activities of the Astronomical Society of the University of Carabobo allows us to conclude that astronomy can affect as a motivating axis for cultural appropriation and scientific enculturation by broad sectors of the local community, regardless of age, schooling, socio-economic activity or ideological-cultural diversity. Key words: scientific enculturation, scientific dissemination, cognition, epistemology, history of science.

As President of the French Association F-HOU, and Professor in science education, I will introduce the use of astronomy as an interdisciplinary approach to science education in primary and secondary level. This presentation will be a convincing exemple of how research in learning science may be helpful to build and evaluate activities that use astronomy for interdisciplinary education. I will first review how astronomy may be introduced into the general science, mathematics and art curricula in France from primary to secondary level. I will then briefly describe a methodology to make interdisciplinary activities that focus on modelisation for secondary classes. To this purpose, we use a dedicated software, called SalsaJ, to allow students to reproduce the same data analysis as made by astronomers. I will describe how lessons may be built with SalsaJ, using the didactic framework of the modelisation. This approach connects mathematics, physics and ICT. I will then develop in a second part a specific approach initiated by F-HOU that use the learning body to model movements of planets with a Human Orrery (a Spatio-Temporal Map of the Solar System), connecting thus mathematics, physics, geography and arts. It is the subject of research projects led in my laboratories with conclusive and positive results. I will present more thoroughly a specific experiment on the teaching of Galilean principles about motions observed in different reference frames, in an astronomical context. All grade 10 students of a French high school (lycée Condorcet, Val de Marne) are involved in two successive teaching-learning sessions, designed within the theoretical framework of embodied cognition. The learning material consists of two versions of a spatio-temporal aspect map of the Solar System that allows the students to enact and observe trajectories from different points of view. One is an A4 model (Printed Orrery, P) used individually on a table, with reference frames and trajectories drawn on a translucid paper; the other is a Human size version (Human Orrery, H), with reference frames and celestial bodies enacted by students’ bodies. Half of the students enact movements with their fngers (P) and then with their bodies (H). The other half experiment Human Orrery (H) and then Printed Orrery (P). Both sessions (H or P) follow the same activities to illustrate the movements of Earth, Mars, and Sun during 24 hours and one year, observed from different reference frames (terrestrial, geocentric or heliocentric). Students’ responses to a conceptual questionnaire are collected before and after each session, as well as three months later. The questionnaire proposes three different situations with the motion of one object observed from two different points of view. We expect students to answer that speed and distance traveled are different for both. Our first results suggest that the sessions do have a significant and lasting effect on students’ understanding of the dependence of motions with reference frames.

Active learning methodologies have been used to teach Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts and Mathematics (STEAM) subjects at higher education institutions in several countries. We report the results of using peer instruction in an Astronomy udergraduate course taught at a research university in Brazil. The course syllabus covered Astrometry and Celestial Mechanics at an introductory level and was offered along 16 weeks in the second semester of 2018 for students majoring in meteorology, physics and chemistry. Each week the students had a pre-class session on a virtual learning environment, which was followed by two 110-minute long sessions on campus. During on-campus sessions the students had hands-on activities, problem-solving group tasks and peer instruction classes, but no traditional lectures were given. A total of 12 peer instruction sessions were held, each one comprising six multiple-choice questions. In order to better investigate the effect of the interaction among students, we have asked them to talk to their peers after the first poll regardless of the outcome. We have then analyzed the outcomes of all peer instruction polls, before and after student interaction, as well as the course evaluation questionnaires answered by the students at the end of the semester. From these analyses we were able to estabilish an approximation between peer instruction and some key elements of Vygotsky’s learning theory.

We are setting up a national network for the detection of bolides (meteors equal to or brighter than Venus). The network consists of a set of stations containing a locally developed system, containing a highly sensitive CCTV camera, fisheye lens (FOV ≈180deg), dew prevention systems, and PC, all housed within a watertight cabinet. The stations run an application also developed locally, which detects, stores and sends by FTP to a central server, the videos with the moving objects detected during the night. The detected fireballs are later processed with an application also developed locally, which allows astrometry and photometry of the event to be carried out.
The stations have been installed in Secondary Schools in the interior of the country. At present we have 3 operating stations and 3 in the process of installation.
Secondary students and their teachers participate in the installation, operation and analysis of the data. A large group of undergraduate students are also actively participating in all the stages of the project.
The scientific objective is to contribute to the detection of meteor showers in the southern sky. With the simultaneous detection of the bolide in 3 stations, we can compute the pre-atmospheric trajectory and heliocentric orbit, and the possible location of falling meteorites. Search for the meteorites will be conducted with the active participation of the local communities.
The general objective of the project is to consolidate a research group, strongly committed to university extension, that contributes to the characterization of meteoric activity at the regional level. The project has a strong component of university outreach, seeking to involve local educational communities, with a “community-based participatory research” (CBPR) approach.
The project is named: Bolidos del Cono Sur – BOCOSUR.
More information about the project is available at: http://bolidos.astronomia.edu.uy/.