IAU WG, Data-driven Astronomy Education and Public Outreach,current status and working plans
aa r X i v : . [ a s t r o - ph . I M ] J a n IAU WG, Data-driven Astronomy Education and Public Outreach,current status and working plans
Chenzhou Cui, Shanshan Li, National Astronomical Observatories, Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS),20A Datun Road, Beijing 100012, China; [email protected]
Abstract.
IAU Inter-Commission B2-C1-C2 WG Data-driven Astronomy Educa-tion and Public Outreach (DAEPO) was launched o ffi cially in April 2017. With thedevelopment of many mega-science astronomical projects, for example CTA, DESI,EUCLID, FAST, GAIA, JWST, LAMOST, LSST, SDSS, SKA, and large scale sim-ulations, astronomy has become a Big Data science. Astronomical data is not onlynecessary resource for scientific research, but also very valuable resource for educationand public outreach (EPO), especially in the era of Internet and Cloud Computing. IAUWG Data-driven Astronomy Education and Public Outreach is hosted at the IAU Di-vision B (Facilities, Technologies and Data Science) Commission B2 (Data and Doc-umentation), and organized jointly with Commission C1 (Astronomy Education andDevelopment), Commission C2 (Communicating Astronomy with the Public), O ffi ceof Astronomy for Development (OAD), O ffi ce for Astronomy Outreach (OAO) andseveral other non IAU communities, including IVOA Education Interest Group, Amer-ican Astronomical Society Worldwide Telescope Advisory Board, Zooniverse projectand International Planetarium Society. The working group has the major objectivesto: Act as a forum to discuss the value of astronomy data in EPO, the advantages andbenefits of data driven EPO, and the challenges facing to data driven EPO; Provideguidelines, curriculum, data resources, tools, and e-infrastructure for data driven EPO;Provide best practices of data driven EPO. In the paper, backgrounds, current status andworking plans in the future are introduced. More information about the WG is availableat: http: // daepo.china-vo.org /
1. Backgrounds
Astronomy education and public outreach (EPO) are always important to not only as-tronomical community but also the entire society. For astronomical community, theywill determine the quality and quantity of the students who are willing to study astron-omy in college and to pursue a lifetime career in astronomy. By proper EPO activities,people will have more understanding and appreciation of astronomy and the generalpublic will support astronomical research more strongly. For the society, basic astron-omy knowledge as long as other basic scientific knowledge should be common sense.The understanding of the sun, the moon, the earth and the universe will enrich daily lifeand study of everyone.While the necessity of astronomy EPO is obvious, most teachers and organizationswho are engaged in astronomical EPO related work still work in the traditional ways.Limited astronomical images making the exhibitions and books rich and colorful butfail to notice that without the real data, misunderstand of the concept in Astronomy1 Cui,Lietal.education can be easily happened. Educators need to spend much more time than theyexpected to explain some astronomy concept. Still, after all the time and e ff orts theyput in, students and the public might not be able to fully understand what is the realuniverse looks like. The EPO of astronomy needs new ways urgently.Astronomy along with many other disciplines and industries has been enteredthe Big Data era. With the operation of many mega-science astronomical projects,for example, Cherenkov Telescope Array(CTA), Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instru-ment(DESI), EUCLID telescope, Global Astrometric Interferometer for Astrophysics(GAIA),James Webb Space Telescope(JWST), Large Synoptic Survey Telescope(LSST), SloanDigital Sky Survey(SDSS), Square Kilometer Array(SKA), Five hundred meter Aper-ture Spherical radio Telescope (FAST) and Large Sky Area Multi-Object Fiber Spec-troscopic Telescope(LAMOST), tens of terabyte scientific data generated every day.Astronomy research becomes a data-driven scientific activity. Though some voice saidthat the flood-like data didn’t really enrich our knowledge and the information we gotis decreasing (Dunham 2006), most people believe as the exponential growth of datavolumes accumulated, scientists, especially astronomers, are o ff ered numerous oppor-tunities to make excitement discoveries, to refine the models they built before and tofill the blanks we have on our knowledge trees.(Borne et al. 2009) In addition to that,even more people realize the huge amount of astronomical data is valuable resource foreducation and public outreach.The Virtual Observatory (VO) aims to provide a research environment that willopen up new possibilities for scientific research based on data discovery, e ffi cient dataaccess, and interoperability. It is envisioned as a complete, distributed research en-vironment for astronomy with large and complex data sets, by federating geographi-cally distributed data and computing assets, and the necessary tools and expertise fortheir use.(CUI & ZHAO 2008) Furthermore, Astroinformatics is a bridge between as-tronomy and ICT (Information and Computation Technology) and applied computerscience. The motivation is to engage a broader community of researchers, both as con-tributors and as consumers of the new methodology for data-intensive astronomy, thusbuilding on the data-grid foundations established by the VO framework.(G. et al. 2014)Big Data in astronomy is challenging our traditional research approaches and willradically transform how we train the next generation of astronomers, whose experienceswith data are now increasingly more virtual (through online databases) than physical(through trips to mountaintop observatories). Data-driven science education (not onlyin astronomy) is not only increasingly vital for the next scientists but also for the nextgeneration public, through which students are trained to access large distributed datarepositories, to conduct meaningful scientific inquiries into the data, to mine and ana-lyze the data, and to make science discoveries.(K.D. 2010)
2. Data Driven Astronomy Education and Public Outreach (DAEPO)
Astronomical data is not only necessary resource for scientific research, but also veryvaluable resource for education and public outreach, especially in the era of Internet andCloud Computing. Very specifically target on the data-driven EPO of astronomy, the In-ternational Astronomical Union Inter-Commission Working Group Data-driven Astron-omy Education and Public Outreach (DAEPO) was launched o ffi cially in April 2017.This working group is hosted at the IAU Division B (Facilities, Technologies and DataScience) Commission B2 (Data and Documentation), and organized jointly with Com-AUWGDAEPO 3mission C1 (Astronomy Education and Development), Commission C2 (Communicat-ing Astronomy with the Public), O ffi ce of Astronomy for Development (OAD), O ffi cefor Astronomy Outreach (OAO) and several other non IAU communities, including In-ternational Virtual Observatory Alliance (IVOA) Education Interest Group, AmericanAstronomical Society Worldwide Telescope Advisory Board, Zooniverse project andInternational Planetarium Society (IPS).(Figure 1) Figure 1. DAEPO Ecosystem
3. Current status
During the very first year, most e ff orts of the WG are related to collect informationabout astronomy EPO, including current status of the astronomy EPO in di ff erent coun-tries and regions, finding out if there is any possible environment and opportunities tocarry out any form of data-driven astronomy EPO activities and practices. We keepfollowing some of the very successful data related astronomy citizen science projects,like Worldwide Telescope (WWT) and ZOONIVERS. We also keep track of projectslike Data to Dome from IPS and ESO, and many others.In May 2017, Shanghai, Dr. Chenzhou Cui reviewed data-driven related astron-omy EPO projects on IVOA Northern Spring Meeting, tried to spread out the idea ofDAEPO and to inspire astronomers and engineers who working on or interested in as-tronomical data to pay close attention to the potential of the data using in education andpublic outreach areas. Led by Dr. Chenzhou Cui, Chinese Virtual Observatory (China-VO) is always interested in using astronomical data to improve astronomy educationand public outreach. In 2015, a data-driven public outreach project called Popular Su-pernova Project (PSP) was initiated as the first citizen science project in Astronomy inChina.(Li et al. 2016) A dozen of supernova or nova have been discovered by publicusers including a ten-year old primary school student.On the ISE2A symposium at Utrecht in July 2017, another talk was given by Dr.Chenzhou Cui about IAU DAEPO WG. This is a symposium specifically concernedabout astronomy education. This report introduced the idea of using astronomical datain science education and public outreach to astronomy educators around the world.As a new thinking and trend of education and public outreach, the concept ofDEAPO is spread by WG members at di ff erent events, including ADASS 2017, As-troinformatics 2017, etc. Cui,Lietal.
4. Working plans
IAU DAEPO WG is ready to keep pushing forward the idea of bring real astronomicaldata into the classroom of primary school, middle school, and into universities or evento public places like planetarium and science museum. The OBJECTIVES of DAEPOworking group are: (cid:3)
1. Act as a forum to discuss the value of astronomy data in EPO, the advantagesand benefits of data driven EPO, and the challenges facing to data driven EPO. (cid:3) (cid:3) ff orts in the form of questionnaires. At the same time, the WG con-tinues involving propaganda activities on international meetings. On the IAU GeneralAssembly in 2018 in Vienna, the working group will co-host a Focus Meeting: FM14IAU’s role on global astronomy outreach, the latest challenges and bridging di ff erentcommunities. Furthermore, the DAEPO WG is also involved in preparing for the IAUAstronomy education symposium 2019, the International Symposium on Education inAstronomy and Astrobiology 2019, and some other events.This work is supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC)(11503051,61402325), the Joint Research Fund in Astronomy (U1531111, U1531115, U1531246,U1731125, U1731243) under cooperative agreement between the NSFC and ChineseAcademy of Sciences (CAS). We would like to thank the National R&D Infrastructureand Facility Development Program of China, "Earth System Science Data Sharing Plat-form" and "Fundamental Science Data Sharing Platform" (DKA2017-12-02-XX). Dataresources are supported by Chinese Astronomical Data Center (CAsDC) and ChineseVirtual Observatory (China-VO). References
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