As well as being the LCO education team, Sarah Eve Roberts and I are also the team behind Space Scoop, an astronomy news service for kids. Although the primary audience for Space Scoop is kids from the age of 8, we know that many older kids and adults also enjoy reading Space Scoop. Each Scoop is written about a brand discovery in astronomy or space sciences, based on a current press release. We aim to release every Space Scoop at the same time as the research press release is published, that way scientists, journalists and kids all get to hear about exciting space news at the same time.
Space Scoop is a Universe Awareness project, and to celebrate their 10 year anniversary, we have been running a comic book writing competition. We received hundreds of entries from 21 countries in 15 different languages, all of them about one of the stories covered by Space Scoop. Sarah, as the editor-in-chief of Space Scoop oversaw the whole competition, and I was the National Coordinating Officer for UK and Ireland.
As you can see from the Universe Awareness Flickr album, there were lots of highly artistic and creative entries.
I am delighted to announce the national winners:
Morgan Kent (8-11 years category)
Eoin Cottrell (12-15 years category)
LCO Space Scoop entries
We will also be contacting all entrants (through their schools) who created comic books about an LCO Space Scoop. It was called "Could aliens be closer than we thought?" and was about the discovery of a planet in the habitable zone around Proxima Centauri (Space Scoop story, original press release). We have recieved some amazingly creative comic books on this subject in English, Spanish, Romanian and Croatian!
We have put together a Google Photo Album of all these comic books.
For the full list of international winners please see the Universe Awareness Space Scoop Competition page.
Congratulations to all the winners. We hope you had fun researching and creating these fantastic, entertaining comics.
