The Netherlands Research School for Astronomy (NOVA) has operated a Mobile Planetarium for over 14 years. Between 2009-2023, the project reached more than 400,000 learners and their teachers across the Netherlands. The project has been popular with schools since the beginning but continues to grow and reach increasing numbers of learners and schools each year. A project like the Mobile Planetarium does not continue growing this way without developing key ingredients or best practices. In this article, we describe the NOVA Mobile Planetarium project in detail and the challenges faced over the last 14 years. Reflection on the different aspects of the project has led to 10 best practices which have been critical to the continued success of this project. In this article, we aim to share our experiences to help other mobile planetarium projects around the world.
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We present the Stargazing Live! program comprising a planetarium experience and supporting lesson activities for pre-university physics education. The mobile planetarium aims to inspire and motivate learners using real telescope data during the experience. Learners then consolidate their learning by creating conceptual models in the DynaLearn software. During development of the program, content experts and stakeholders were consulted. Three conceptual model lesson activities have been created: star properties, star states and the fusion-gravity balance. The present paper evaluates the planetarium experience plus the star properties lesson activity in nine grade 11 and 12 classes across three secondary schools in the Netherlands. Learners are very positive about the planetarium experience, but they are less able to link the topics in the planetarium to the curriculum. The conceptual modelling activity improves the learners understanding of the causal relationship between the various stellar properties. Future work includes classroom testing of the star states and fusion-gravity balance lessons.
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Een bezoek aan het Mobiele Planetarium is leerzaam en stimulerend voor kinderen. Om tijdens het bezoek talent bij kinderen te laten ontluiken en ontwikkelen, is er meer nodig dan alleen informatie over te brengen. In dit artikel wordt gepoogd om antwoord te krijgen hoe het programma, zowel de presentatie als de voorbereiding en de verwerking van het Mobiele Planetarium met implementatie van TalentenKracht uitgebreid kan worden, zodat het redenatieniveau van de kinderen voor, tijdens en na het bezoek aan het Mobiele Planetarium verhoogd kan worden en talent kan ontstaan. Om antwoord op deze vraag te krijgen zijn er diverse presentaties in verschillende situaties in het Mobiele Planetarium gefilmd en geanalyseerd. Resultaten laten zien dat gesteld kan worden dat de implementatie van TalentenKracht in de presentatie van het Mobiele Planetarium vooruitgang gebracht heeft in de interactie, het soort uitingen en de afwisseling van uitingen die gemaakt worden. Over het gebruik van een voor- en natraject kunnen weinig conclusies getrokken worden. Dit komt onder andere omdat er geen vergelijking mogelijk was met een andere klas.
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Stargazing Live! aims to capture the imagination of students with a combination of live and interactive planetarium lessons, real astronomical data, and lessons built around interactive knowledge representations . The lessons were created using a co-creation model and tackle concepts in the pre-university (astro)physics curriculum which students find difficult to grasp with traditional interventions. An evaluation study in nine Dutch classrooms showed that learners are inspired and engaged by the planetarium but are not always able to link the content to the classroom.
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Stargazing Live! aims to capture the imagination of students of all ages with live and interactive (mobile) planetarium lessons about the transient universe incorporating semi-live data from the Dutch MeerLICHT and BlackGEM telescopes. The most advanced lesson, at pre-university physics level, also aims to support the teaching and learning of key curriculum concepts. Results from the evaluation study show that pre-university physics students are engaged and inspired by the planetarium lesson but find it difficult to link the topics to what they learn in their physics lessons, supporting the need for follow-up classroom-based activities. To address this omission, lesson activities have been created for this age group to accompany the planetarium shows using the interactive tool DynaLearn (https://dynalearn.nl/). The lessons challenge students to model key curriculum concepts linked to the telescopes and their science such as stellar properties and the balance within a main-sequence star. The lessons were created using a co-creation model – led by science education experts with significant input from astronomers, astronomy outreach/education professionals and physics teachers. Knowledge questionnaires, completed immediately prior to and after the ‘stellar properties’ activity showed a significant increase in the number of students able to correctly describe the causal relationships between mass and other properties in a main sequence star such as luminosity, gravity, and temperature. All materials are freely available in both English and Dutch (https://www.astronomie.nl/stargazinglive).
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Stargazing Live! aims to capture the imagination of learners with a combination of live and interactive planetarium lessons, real astronomical data, and lessons built around interactive knowledge representations. The lessons were created using a co-creation model and tackle concepts in the pre-university (astro)physics which students find difficult to grasp with traditional interventions. An evaluation study in 9 Dutch classrooms showed that learners are inspired and engaged by the planetarium lessons but are not always able to link the content to the classroom. Pre- and post-tests showed that the accompanying star properties activity significantly increased learners’ understanding of the causal relationships between mass and other properties (such as luminosity, gravity, and temperature) in a main sequence star.
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NOVA coordinates a group of three inflatable mobile planetariums which visit around 200 primary and secondary schools per year (~30,000 students/year). After an initial stop in activities (March-June 2020) due to the COVID-19 crisis, NOVA restarted school visits in July 2020 using a high quality flat-screen. Since the start of the second peak of the COVID-19 pandemic in October 2020, the decision was made to suspend visits to secondary schools until at least the end of 2020. In late October and early November NOVA has performed extensive testing with a variety of online tools to continue to reach out to schools during the second wave of the pandemic in the Netherlands. In this article we describe the different platforms, discuss the technical considerations and report on the experiences with the first schools.
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In this workshop we present three lesson activities to teach core (astro)physics concepts at pre-university level which students find difficult to grasp with traditional interventions: star properties, star states and the fusion-gravity balance. In each activity, students construct and simulate a conceptual cause-effect model. An evaluation study in nine Dutch classrooms showed that the star properties lesson significantly increased students’ understanding of the underlying causal relationships. The lessons were created as part of the Stargazing Live! project, which inspires students with an interactive planetarium lesson incorporating real astrophysical data before triggering deep learning with the conceptual modelling activities.
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This paper presents three qualitative models that were developed for the Stargazing Live! program. This program consists of a mobile planetarium that aims to inspire and motivate learners using real telescope data during the experience. To further consolidate the learning experience three lessons are available that teachers can use as follow up activities with their learners. The lessons implement a pedagogical approach that focuses on learning by creating qualitative models with the aim to have learners learn subject specific concepts as well as generic systems thinking skills. The three lessons form an ordered set with increasing complexity and were developed in close collaboration with domain experts.
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