The Milky-Way Hands-on with Gaia

This project will continue and enhance the outreach activities of the Gaia team at the University of Cambridge in bringing the Gaia mission to school students and the general public in a hands-on way. Gaia is a European Space Agency cornerstone mission to map the Milky Way: we are taking advantage of the inspirational value of astronomy and space science to engage the public with cutting-edge, STFC-funded research and to attract pupils to STEM subjects. As part of this project, our team of Gaia experts will bring our existing interactive Gaia stand, which includes technical scale models and hands-on activities, to science fairs and similar events at schools' and public venues.
This project will use Gaia as a context to highlight the broad range of STEM careers relating to astronomy and space-science missions. Gaia encompasses disciplines from engineering to develop the technology for the mission, to advanced computing to tackle the challenge presented by big data, to the many areas of fundamental science research needed to interpret these data. The UK has had a significant industrial involvement in Gaia, and also has a key role in delivering and analysing the scientific data meaning that we have examples of well-known employers for students. We will highlight the range of exciting career opportunities to pupils - especially those at Key Stages 2-4 - and their teachers and parents.
We will also use these events as a way to increase traffic to our Gaia website https://gaia.ac.uk. At our schools' events, we will engage large numbers of school students and their teachers in conversations about how they can get involved with the aim of enthusing them about the idea of taking part in real science. We will explain the educational resources we have available on our website (and in development) and sign up on the day for more information, thus building a community of teachers that we can work with in the future to bring Gaia into the classroom. We will develop teacher packs to support teachers in getting further involved in the classroom, and other group leaders, and Gaia presenter packs for scientists with presentation slides and supporting materials to facilitate scientists around the UK in giving Gaia presentations in their region. We will provide these groups with "freebies" - stickers, badges,.. advertising the website url.
The coming year will see Gaia's first public data release (September 2016), a key opportunity for engaging the public with the mission. (The second data release takes place approximately one year later and will include a wealth of extra data). We will explain the significance of the Gaia data being released by producing and distributing new information packs at our public events. We will update these for the second data release to explain the new data and the latest results from studies done with data from the first release. We aim to showcase the world-class astronomy research related to Gaia that is being carried out by UK and STFC-funded scientists. We will have a team of Gaia experts willing to travel to publicity events connected with the Gaia Data Releases.
The expected overall impact of this project is large: we will reach 40000 targeted demographic audiences at large events. Visitors are made aware of the Gaia mission, view our scale models and get an idea of Gaia's purpose, taking away further reading material and freebies highlighting our Gaia website, which has many further resources. At large events we reach on average 2,500 people per day with an in-depth conversation about Gaia science, technology, careers and how to get involved. Ten teachers perday sign-up for further information planning future classroom activities. And spread the word, multiplying impact.
The materials developed for the project will be used to inspire other audiences through speaker packs, allowing many local talks given by members of the UK-wide Gaia academic community.

We will advertise the events that we will attend as part of this project on our website https://gaia.ac.uk/latest-events and through the publicity of the event organisers (the event brochure, website, etc). We will also post information on our Gaia website about the information packs and teacher packs that we develop through this project and will have available at events. We will post Gaia presenter packs on our website and advertise that schools, clubs and societies can request freebies from us for Gaia-related activities they have organised. We will advertise our events and resources through dedicated networks such as the National Science Learning Network, ESERO-UK and the National STEM Centre eNewsletter, which highlights secondary-focused news, blogs, resources and CPD activities.

We will distribute the majority of the Gaia information packs and teacher packs that we produce at the science fairs we attend as part of this project. We will distribute further smaller numbers of packs at additional events we attend, such as press conferences for the Gaia data release and at talks regularly given by members of our team outside of this project (to the public, schools, amateur astronomical societies, etc).

We will write blog posts about each of the events we attend as part of this project and post them on our website to inform a variety of audiences and interest them in what we are doing.

We will report on the status and outcomes of this project at national and international conferences, for example we will inform other scientists at Gaia and Gaia Alerts conferences (these usually take place in the UK or around Europe) and we will inform other science communicators and outreach specialists at meetings such as the outreach sessions of the National Astronomy Meeting in the UK. We intend to publish our practices and findings in science education journals, such as School Science Review and Astronomy & Geophysics (a publication of the Royal Astronomical Society).