On Monday 11 July, teachers from a dozen secondary schools who took part in the first year of the project Faulkes Telescopes in Catalonia are meeting at the Parc Astronòmic del Montsec (PAM) with ICCUB researchers who coordinate the project locally. The aim of the meeting is to share the experiences of the various centers as well as define the objectives for the following year.
The project, coordinated by researchers from the Institute of Cosmos Sciences of the University of Barcelona (ICCUB), has allowed high school students to make observations with the telescopes of Las Cumbres Observatory (LCO), a network of professional telescopes of up to 2 m in diameter, installed in some of the best observatories in the world, such as Haleakala (Hawaii) or Siding Springs (Australia). Through astronomy, students have worked on multidisciplinary skills such as math, physics, programming, English, teamwork, or collaboration.
Students and teachers have very well received this project in its first year of implementation in schools in Catalonia. Students have prepared observation sessions and have even been able to control live telescopes remotely (link to news), using the “real-time interface” (RTI) platform offered by the Faulkes Telescopes project. Also noteworthy are the observation guides prepared by the students of the Institut d'Alcarràs (link here), and the honorable mention in the National Phase of Incubator of Sondeos y Experimentos "at work" Galaxies: Relationship between the bulb and its halo "carried out by students at the Torre Vicens Institute in Lleida (link to news).
