The Faulkes Telescope Project recently ran a full day CPD event at Cardiff University in conjunction with Techniquest. This welcomed 12 physics teachers who were introduced to some of the Faulkes educational resources and how they can be used in their classroom.

Sarah began the day by getting everyone signed up to a telescope account and showing the teachers how to plan an observing session using the free Stellarium software. Stellarium is a great tool that allows you to look at what’s in the night sky at a particular time from a particular location. We have instructional materials on our resource pages which can be found here.

Following this, Fraser demonstrated how you can view and download your images once your observations have been made which can be used for image processing and data analysis. Activities based on image processing can be found here.

Sophie then introduced everyone to the Gaia Alerts project and how schools can “adopt a supernova” to observe using the Faulkes Telescopes and LCOGT network. Teachers were able to measure the fade of a supernova target over several months and produce a light curve using SalsaJ and Microsoft Excel.

Some standalone classroom activities related to Gaia and the physics curriculum can be found here.

After lunch, Fraser introduced teachers to the Go-Lab project (Global Online Science Labs for Inquiry Learning at School). This is an online platform that provides virtual and remote labs for STEM learning. Teachers went through the lab “Craters on Earth and Other Planets” which uses the Down2Earth Impact Calculator to explore impact events on Earth. This lab can be accessed here.

To wrap up the session, teachers were asked to think of and plan ideas of how they might use some of the material in their own classroom and how it could tie in with their teaching.

For more information on future events that we are involved with, check out our Upcoming Events page. If you would like more information on any of our material, please don’t hesitate to get in touch!