Santa Barbara Junior High meets Messier Bingo

This week (on 8 December 2014) Eric Saunders, LCOGT software team leader, was invited to speak to year 7 science class in Santa Barbara Junior High. I volunteered to go along with him to help.

We weren’t sure how much science this class would have done, so we thought we would start with showing them some LCOGT telescopes, talking about why astronomers think a global network is a good thing.While we were talking about the globe we did a demo explaining how the seasons work. We used the example from Universe in a Box by Universe Awareness.

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As a little bit of homework, we told the students that they had to go home and explain to their parents how seasons work. I'm very interested to hear back from their teacher to see if any of them did that!

Finally we wanted to give them something fun but still educational. The obvious choice was Messier Bingo. In this activity the students learn to recognise astronomical objects from their shapes whilst playing a game of bingo using objects from the Messier catalogue instead of ...