More like this, please.
The new Sky Explorers club at Wheatfields Junior School in St Albans is making use of a night sky camera which has been installed on the building's roof. "I am really looking forward to doing all the great stuff we are going to do with the camera," says eight-year-old Cameron. "Looking at space is really exciting."
Throughout the night, the camera takes a long exposure shot of the whole sky once a minute and the resulting thousands of images are made into a time-lapse film for the children to view the next day. The club members will be on the look-out for shooting stars or meteors and will log where they appear, their direction and the time and send the data to the international All Sky Camera network.
Dr Geach, who studies galaxies, also has a second task for the children, directly related to his own research. He plans to give the children access to images from the Subaru telescope on Hawaii, which takes pictures of deep space, to look for interesting or unusual looking galaxies. "Some of them will not have been seen before and could be very exciting," he says. He will come to the school every two weeks to run the club, answer the children's questions and evaluate their research.
This kind of engagement by scientists with primary pupils is "one of the things we need to do, as this age is when you can really get them switched on as scientists", he adds. This view has strong support from Dr Becky Parker, director of the Institute for Research in Schools. "Students get a diet of quite factual based science in school and yet they have the potential to contribute," she says. "Why not involve them in doing real science? Teachers find it keeps them inspired and keeps them right at the cutting edge of their subjects."
"Too often a lack of resources in schools makes encountering real science very difficult. But, for example, you would be appalled if students had never put pen to paper when doing art GCSE, or never made any kind of music while doing music A-level. If all you have done is learn the facts of what biology or chemistry have shown us, you haven't actually engaged with what it is. We are passionately committed to making sure that pupils get as rich an experience of science as we possibly can."
http://www.bbc.com/news/education-40125352
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