Stars for Schools

The Stars for Schools project will bring the astrophysics of stars into the lives of about 150 students over three years at our partner schools. Through collaborative exercises and short research projects using the Window to the Stars software on cost-effective Raspberry Pi computers, the Stars for Schools programme teaches the mathematics and physics needed to understand stars to students who have little or no experience with scientific research. It also introduces students to Python coding to solve real science-research problems involving genuine astronomical data, much of the generation of which was funded by STFC. While Stars for Schools focuses on the astrophysics part of STFC's science, the skills our students learn, particularly in research-project work, apply also more generally to all STFC's science goals.

This application is development stage two of the Stars for Schools programme after a successful pilot which has run during the academic years 2020/21 and 2021/22. Our first aim is to spread the programme to new-partner schools, of which we already have 12, 42% of which are in areas with first-third Polar4 quintiles. Additionally, in parallel to expanding our existing programme for 15-17 year-old students with newly-developed resources for teachers, we will extend Stars for Schools to students aged 11-14 and provide a clear path to using our programme in physics teaching from ages 11 to 17. We are already working with the Royal Astronomical Society and the Royal Society to promote the program through their teaching and outreach platforms. If stage two is successful, our long-term goal is to offer and support Stars for Schools through further outreach programmes like Isaac Physics.

Stars for Schools also provides a unique opportunity for university research students, e.g. PhD students, many of whom are funded by STFC, to gain essential experience in public engagement and education as mentors to our school students. By matching universities to local schools the programme establishes a foundation for future collaboration and communication, the goal of which is to encourage school students to take up STEM subjects at university.

The Stars for Schools programme includes material from two of STFC's five public-engagement themes: Big Telescopes and Big Data and Computing. The projects offered in the programme use real data from big telescopes and show that we need astrophysical models of stars to understand such data and get full value from the investment in telescopic hardware. We also introduce our students to using computer code, in the form of short Python programs, to solve real scientific problems. In most cases this will be the first time the students have used a computer for such a task, so we are really introducing them to research at a young age and hopefully inspiring them to use computers in their own future scientific studies, be that at university or in industry. During the pilot programme, our students pointed out that there is no opportunity within the curriculum to combine physics, mathematics and computer-science skills together, and that this project offered them this. Development of such science capital is a key positive aspect of Stars for Schools.

Stars for Schools combines software and projects to teach stellar astrophysics using Raspberry Pi (RPi) computers. The RPis will be distributed to participating schools pre-installed with the software and documentation. Course material will be available under a Creative Commons licence on the new Stars for Schools website with long-term storage at publicly-accessible locations, e.g. Zenodo.

Colleagues/students at Surrey have already volunteered to act as mentors and disseminate the material to local (London/Surrey) schools. 4 of our 12 current schools lie outside London and for these we have support from the UK stellar-astrophysics BRIDGCE group and universities across the UK (Bristol, Herts, Keele, York and Liverpool). We will make videos available on platforms like YouTube to train teachers and mentors. Online videos also mean that school students have suitable digital content - key in the modern social-media age. We will use our online-teaching experience to make high-quality videos - the applicant won a Surrey Student Union award for online lecturing (20/21) and was rated 100% (21/22). We will also offer support by email, Slack and Twitter.

An aim of this project is to develop Stars for Schools so it can be offered to school-physics course providers. Programmes like Isaac Physics are ideal: their director already says "It would be great to collaborate and hopefully mutually beneficial". Similarly, the University of Surrey physics department has a dedicated outreach office who already advertise Stars for Schools, and who promote it through the SEPnet "Connect physics" and Surrey Physics Academy programmes.

Window to the Stars, the code in Stars to Schools, has been used in our Astronomy Research in Schools programme, is part of Physics Research in School Environments (PRiSE) based at Queen Mary University London. Martin Archer's (QMUL) work was inspirational and we hope that Stars for Schools will become a unit of education in PRiSE. The Royal Astronomical Society has held online sessions for primary and secondary students. Our online videos will naturally add to this, and our PhD-student mentors will, by then, have the experience to handle online Q&A sessions.

Informing teachers and scientists about the Stars for Schools programme is best achieved through events of the Royal Astronomical Society and Royal Society, such as the National Astronomy Meeting, Royal Society Summer Science Exhibition and Isaac Physics symposia. We are already in discussion with both the RAS and RS who are very supportive of the project, with the RS offering help to schools apply for funding. The RS has the links we need to extend the reach of the project nationwide, while the RAS already have Stars for Schools listed on their education/outreach website. More schools will be identified through the Physics Teaching News and Content (Institute of Physics) mailing list and STEM Community message boards.

We will publish articles in Astronomy and Geophysics, and journals for education specialists, both at school and university level. With the extension to Stars for Schools this grant provides, we will be in the perfect position to publish with three years' of statistics involving about 200 students.

The programme has already attracted international attention. Colleagues in Germany and Belgium want to translate it for their schools. The applicant will submit a German Ministry of Education grant with Heidelberg colleagues to adapt the programme.

RPi computers are currently hard to source because of global issues. The RPi foundation think this will pass by 2023 (https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/supply-chain-shortages-and-our-first-ever-price-increase/) and, if not, we can provide Stars for Schools as a free virtual machine for existing PCs (this worked well in the pilot). The RPi is preferred but we want STFC to be sure that we have a well-tested backup in case the global semiconductor supply-and-demand situation deteriorates.