Discover the COSMOS


created: Thu, 05 Jul 2012

The aim of the workshop was getting secondary sciences' teachers to know Discover the COSMOS project. As it was the first face-to-face approach between them and the support team of Discosmos in Spain, the main objective was to make the project basis clear and estimate who of them would follow the project during next academic year.
Moreover, the workshop aimed to present the variety of infrastructures, tools and applications offered by Discosmos and then talk in depth about some particular exercises.

The program of the workshop was structured in three different parts. The beginning consisted on presenting Discosmos as an european research project and showing the magnitude of the network involved on it. Plus, the wide variety of tools and exercises offered by Discosmos was shown, as well as how the validation process is going to take part and how does the project partners support them during the process.
After, the program proceeded with an introduction to the question why is important to study the space and why Astronomy and the Universe are suitable tools and scenarios to learn sciences in a natural science laboratory, using real scientific data. Following this introduction, we proceeded to show how the exercise "Setting references when everything moves - stellar streams" works and how it is a suitable application for explaining science problems using as a scenario real images from Serpens constellation.
At the end of the workshop, teachers were invited to present their questions and doubts about both the project and their participation on it. This informal conversation worked as a fluent discussion about educational necessities of the students and teachers in their context.

Participants:
No of the participants: 14

Type of target group:
a) teachers: 9
b) teacher trainer: 2
c) students
d) curriculum developer
e) policy maker
f) researcher
g) staff of museum/science center
h) representative of other outreach group
i) others: 3 facilitators in organizing and contacting the teachers in the geographical area of influence.