Astronomy Summer School Outreach Day 2024
In 2024, Canterbury Christ Church University’s STFC Astronomy and AI Summer School with Public Engagement provided attendees with sessions on public engagement and outreach training. The summer school also gave them the opportunity to work with us on a public engagement event for secondary schools, which included immersive tech to communicate ideas in astronomy, and assessing generative AI as a tool for creating activities and puzzles relating to their work.
Activities included a ‘Becoming an Astronomer’ Q&A session, an ‘escape room’ of science puzzles, and a VR experience for students to explore the International Space Station! Here is the advert for the outreach day, and see below for some of the interesting videos and activities produced as a result!
How real is this?
This video presents a conversation between an astronomer (Natalie Lines) and a historian (Martin Watts) over images that are associated with each of their disciplines.
‘Becoming an Astronomer’ – Q&A with Astronomers
A number of Q&A videos with astronomers have also been produced for use by teachers in schools, which address popular questions posed by secondary school students during outreach events.
Escape Room
The students attending the summer school designed challenges for an ‘escape room’ that we held for secondary school students the following day.
Here we see a photo of summer school attendees Natalie Lines and Robyn Evren working on the droplet investigation part of the escape room.
Below is a video of the escape room, in which we see Prof. Berry Billingsley and PhD student William Beckwith-Chandler presenting the challenges to the school students.
Timetable
Here is the timetable from the outreach event.
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