This week (on 8 December 2014) Eric Saunders, LCOGT software team leader, was invited to speak to 7th grade science class in Santa Barbara Junior High. I volunteered to go along with him to help.
We weren't sure how much science this class would have done, so we thought we would start with showing them some LCOGT telescopes, talking about why astronomers think a global network is a good thing.While we were talking about the globe we did a demo explaining how the seasons work. We used the example from Universe in a Box by Universe Awareness.
As a little bit of homework, we told the students that they had to go home and explain to their parents how seasons work. I'm very interested to hear back from their teacher to see if any of them did that!
Finally we wanted to give them something fun but still educational. The obvious choice was Messier Bingo. In this activity the students learn to recognise astronomical objects from their shapes whilst playing a game of bingo using objects from the Messier catalogue instead of just numbers. Each student gets a score card and each time they completed a row, they got a (limited edition) LCOGT sticker. There is nothing like the possibility of prize to keep your audience's attention (this works just as well for astronomers as it does for school children).
By the end of the session the class were shouting out when they saw Spiral Galaxies and Globular clusters, consistently. Hopefully that means they had fun but also learned something about astronomy! We weren't quite brave enough to do an On Sky session, mostly because this was the first time we had visited this school and only had 50 minutes!
It is always a pleasure to visit a school but I've found that middle and junior school classes are often the most lively and engaging. Santa Barbara Junior High was certainly no exception.
