The FT team have just completed their first teacher training day in the US, as part of the Las Cumbres Observatory Global Telescope Network education programme.

Sarah Roberts and Paul Roche attended the Kavli Institute of Theoretical Physics (KITP) teachers conference at the Univ. of California Santa Barbara (UCSB), on Saturday 17th March, and then ran an additional one day teacher training workshop on Sunday 18th for around 35 of the conference attendees. The highly regarded KITP event attracts educators from all over the US, and this year was attended by around 120 high school teachers.

The University of California Santa Barbara

Attendance at the LCOGTN training day had to be limited due to the size of the venue and the availability of equipment, but even so this represents the largest training day that we have run so far. The workshop covered all the normal areas that we include in UK teacher training, and was aimed at encouraging a “first generation” of teachers across the US to get involved with the set-up of the LCOGTN education programmes.

Staff from LCOGTN in Santa Barbara helped out with the event, which was opened by Wayne Rosing himself (who also saved the day by buying enough extension leads to keep all 20 laptops running throughout the workshop!). Rachel Ross, who is the outreach specialist for LCOGTN in the US, gave a talk on the project at the Saturday conference, and ran the “making colour/color images” session on Sunday.

Rachel will be working with these teachers to get LCOGTN running in California, Hawaii and Arizona initially. She will be joined by Jessica Barton, who arrives in Santa Barbara early in April – Jessica is a US high school teacher who has been living in the UK for the past few years, and has been working closely with David Bowdley in Wolverhampton to “translate” the existing UK materials into a format suitable for use in the US.