In October, Fraser Lewis, Anita Heward and Sophie Bartlett from the Faulkes Telescope Project team presented at the 3^rd Shaw-IAU Workshop on Astronomy for Education.

The workshop focused on the various opportunities available to people who are active in astronomy education, whether as practitioners or researchers. The workshop sought to answer the question: in an ideal world, what are the things all of us in the astronomy education field should know?

Fraser presented a talk in the ‘Astronomy Education with Authentic Data’ session where he showed examples of IBSE (Inquiry-Based Science Education) activities, designed to be “teacher-free”, and used as extended projects for students of astronomy and space science.

Each of these activities uses data and resources from the Faulkes Telescope Project and the National Schools’ Observatory. They are based on open clusters and exoplanets and also use data from Type Ia supernovae, all of which provide an insight into the scientific process. The supernova activity allows users to perform browser-based photometry (using JS9) on images to add additional data-points to the Hubble Plot, enabling them to measure the expansion rate and age of the Universe. Fraser was also part of the selection committee for talks in the ‘Remote Observing’ session.

You can watch Fraser’s talk here.

Anita presented the ‘Europlanet Evaluation Toolkit’, a set of simple data collection and analysis tools designed for easy integration into outreach and education activities to help evaluate their effectiveness and impact. The toolkit is available as a set of interactive webpages and a downloadable pdf, and can also be ordered as a hard copy in the form of a booklet and set of activity cards.

You can watch Anita’s talk here.

Sophie presented ‘How did that happen?: Mixed-method evaluation of astronomy resources’ that used her PhD research to demonstrate what practitioners can learn from astronomy education interventions through implementing mixed-method evaluation. Sophie described how by using quantitative methods (e.g. numbers and figures) to identify what happens, and qualitative methods (e.g. words and descriptions) to identify why this happens and under what circumstances, practitioners can gain a more holistic understanding of the impact of their interventions.

You can watch Sophie’s talk here.

The full workshop proceedings are available online on the IAU website here.