ASTRO-Chile News
Student Videoconference Has Far-Reaching Results Across the Equator
A special student-to-student videoconference was held at the National Optical Astronomy Observatory (NOAO) on May 12, 2006. The videoconference was a two-way conference that made use of the internet to view participants at two locations, Tucson, Arizona and La Serena, Chile, headquarters for NOAO North and South. There were a half of a dozen schools with a couple hundred students in Chile who participated in a remote sensing activity over the months of February, March and April. 50 of those students were in attendance in La Serena on May 12. There have been 5 teachers with almost as many students who participated in the activity from Tucson.
Even half a world apart and across people of different languages and cultures, the most effective ways to teach concepts in science is hands-on with discussion following. Since the Fall of 2002, NOAO North in Tucson & NOAO South in Chile have held videoconference workshops for teachers and for students in Tucson, AZ, and La Serena, Chile. The teachers and students exchanged methods and ideas about how to teach and learn about light and color, various physics activities, light pollution monitoring, lunar eclipse activities and now a remote sensing activity. The workshops are held in Spanish and English and are facilitated by the bilingual science teachers from the Tucson area and the teachers from Chile.
The remote sensing activity associated with the student videoconference on May 12 allowed students to become acquainted with the geography and geology of the Tucson area by viewing and analyzing maps of the city from the LandSat satellite. After becoming comfortable with the activity, the Tucson students analyzed an image of La Serena and the students from Chile analyzed an image of Tucson. Since the top-down view from the satellite images does not always tell the whole story, Tucson students emailed students from the La Serena area and asked them to act like remote rovers and take pictures of areas of the city on which they had questions and email the pictures to Tucson. The students in Tucson meanwhile acted as remote rovers and took pictures of areas of Tucson that the Chilean students had questions on, since the Chilean students were doing a similar analysis on a map of Tucson.
It is hoped that the activity and the videoconference, where the students reported their results, provided opportunities for the students to get to know students from this other culture and to have a platform to ask one another questions. We came together today not only to exchange ideas on how we teach and learn a particular area of science, but to celebrate our diversity, our curiosity and our willingness to learn from each other about each other. The enthusiasm conveyed by the students will always be remembered.
Sincere thanks are extended to the following people:
The remote sensing activity was written by Dr. Ron Probst. Ron is an astronomer and an engineer, but also a man who will always have the people of Chile and his passion for conveying science as priorities in his life. We thank him for his commitment to the project.
Many thanks go to the Tucson teachers and their students who spent a lot of time and effort testing and modifying the early versions of the activity.
We thank all of the students and their teachers for their commitment to this project. They are the ones who have relentlessly completed each step of the activity from start to finish, asking questions and finding the answers. As a final step in the activity, students in each country were to be the remote eyes for students in the other country and take requested photos of locations for the other students. An equally important result was for students from both countries to get to know each other through their emails and pictures.
And many, many thanks to Hugo Ochoa, who has been leading the effort in Chile. He did a tremendous job in organizing the teachers and students there and in securing the success of the project.
Sincerely,
Connie Walker
Education Specialist/Associate Scientist
