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NOAO Educational Outreach (1Mar96)
(from Director's Office, NOAO Newsletter No. 45, March 1996)

The NOAO has established an advisory board to assist with its expanding
educational outreach activities. This Outreach Advisory Board (OAB)
includes fifteen middle and high school teachers selected from school
districts in the vicinity of Tucson, Arizona. The OAB will advise NOAO
on a range of outreach activities, initially and primarily, our
Educational Outreach Program. We continue to be interested in hosting a
series of summer workshops for teachers using the facilities of Kitt
Peak National Observatory, providing real astronomical data on a
regular basis in support of open-ended, research-based projects in
middle and high school classrooms.

To provide informed feedback to NOAO, the OAB was given access to NOAO
in the form of three one-day workshops. The first of these workshops
took place on 28 November 1995 at the NOAO downtown headquarters in
Tucson, Arizona. NOAO staff members Karen Harvey, Beatrice Mueller, and
George Jacoby spoke about their current astronomical research; the
teachers also heard about existing outreach activities and were given a
tour of the extensive facilities of the NOAO downtown headquarters. On
5 January and 20 January the second workshop took place, as OAB
teachers spent 24 hours on Kitt Peak, visiting the various telescopes
and learning how the Observatories serve the professional astronomical
community. Special thanks to the observers those nights who shared
their domes, science, and career paths with the group: Ian Gatley and
Mike Merrill, Richard Green and Buell Jannuzi (all NOAO), Paul Green
(CfA), Norbert Zacharias and Marion Zacharias (USNO), Laurence Jones
(NASA/GSFC), and James Brown (Toronto). In February, The OAB met again to
discuss how the resources of NOAO could be put to effective use in the
science classrooms, locally and nationally, and to set the agenda for future
OAB activities.

Suzanne H. Jacoby, NOAO Education Officer

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