Outreach

Public lecture:

The SAAO hosts public open nights every Saturday which consist of a 1 hour talk followed by star gazing. Prof. Russ Taylor, the Director of the Inter-university Institute for Data Intensive Astronomy, will give a Public Talk that highlights the incredible shift occurring in astronomy with respect to Simulations and Big Data. This public lecture will be recorded and made available offline for use by researchers, schools, teachers, clubs, and societies alike.

School visits:

Together with the outreach team at the South African Astronomical Observatory (the SALT Collateral Benefits Programme (SCBP)), we will visit at four schools in the Western Cape. Members of the SOC, invited speakers and a selection of speakers and participants from the FM will be invited to give talks and to help with the development and implementation of hands-on activities and exercises. Each visit will be ∼2-3 hours. The most impactful exercises will be used to inform the teacher training (see below) which will also be held during the GA.

Teacher workshop:

Around 25-30 teachers will be invited to learn about computational astrophysics topics and resources – from teaching students how to program (e.g., with SCRATCH a tool for children that has been translated into over 70 languages including, e.g., isiXhosa, isiZulu, Afrikaans) to running simple computations on the research cloud. We will highlight the possibilities for student activities which can be run on tablets and mobile phones, and projects on the African Research Cloud that include elementary programming. The materials developed for this workshop will be used for future teacher workshops run by the SCBP, they will be shared with the IAU OAO, OAE and OAD for wider dissemination, and added to online repositories, e.g., the AfAS portal and Hack4Dev.