Joanna Holt

Aimed at both in-person and online participants

Stargazing Live! aims to capture the imagination of students of all ages with live and interactive planetarium lessons incorporating semi-live data from the Dutch MeerLICHT and BlackGEM telescopes. Results from the evaluation study in classrooms show that learners are engaged and inspired by the planetarium lesson but find it difficult to link the topics to what they learn in their physics lessons, supporting the need for follow-up classroom-based activities. To address this omission, lesson activities have been created for upper secondary school level to accompany the planetarium shows using the interactive tool DynaLearn (https://dynalearn.nl/). The lessons challenge students to model key curriculum concepts linked to the telescopes and their science such as stellar properties and the balance within a main-sequence star. The lessons were created using a co-creation model – led by science education experts with significant input from astronomers, astronomy outreach/education professionals and physics teachers. Knowledge questionnaires, completed immediately prior to and after the ‘stellar properties’ activity showed a significant increase in the number of students able to correctly describe the causal relationships between mass and other properties in a main-sequence star such as luminosity, gravity, and temperature. In this workshop, participants learn about the Stargazing Live! project and experience the (freely available) concept modelling activity in the DynaLearn tool. Participants need to bring their own laptop and have access to the internet during the workshop.