All three of the founders of NextAstro have long experience in trying to enable students to get their own images and make their own discoveries using Robotic Telescopes. In particular, how do you do this at scale (Fitzgerald et al. 2014, Gomez & Fitzgerald 2017) with teachers who, even when keen, can find it difficult to address the various impediments to in-class usage of bringing the technology into the classroom (Fitzgerald et al. 2019).

There are curriculum limitations (Salimpour et al. 2020) but also curriculum opportunities (Salimpour, Fitzgerald & Hollow 2024). However, currently the number of teachers actually taking up this opportunity is dwarfed by the amount of students in the world! (Yen, Fitzgerald & Salimpour, in press)

How do we bring robotic telescopes to classroom teaching? Essentially we need to make it easier and more attractive to do it this way than what we usually do.

Where there has been a lot of success around the world have been with those positively inclined early adopter teachers mentioned in the 2019 paper above, even with such predisposed teachers, there are limits that we come up against. And for Chemistry teachers these are doubly and for Biology teachers triply and for out-of-field teachers quadruply so.

Some of the factors that must be overcome to do astronomy in the classroom are listed below. Many of these are not just astronomy specific but apply to bringing anything similar into the classroom. And many of the issues can make it readily apparent why these opportunities, in the past, have been preferentially more successful in higher resourced private schools than in a general school.

• Sufficient professional development opportunities to learn the new approach.
• Capacity to organise the school schedule and class time.
• Capacity to take risks within the school culture
• Ability to take a different direction through the mandated syllabus or curriculum
• Being in a school that values STEM or astronomy in particular
• Access to reliable internet
• Access to I.T. people to address software issues

It can be seen above that these tend to be issues that are more available to teachers from schools that are more resourced than others and, in a matthew (“rich get richer”) effect this compounds as teachers who have more training and experience in the classroom become more proficient and confident in undertaking classroom astronomy.

While we have a lot of success with such teachers, we feel it is also our mission to support teachers who may not be so privileged or even particularly interested in the content area. In contrast to a physics teacher who may have a passion for astronomy, the general majority high school science teacher is more likely to have the following attributes:

• Is a general science teacher, not a physics specialist
• Does not know much about astronomy compared to their actual interest area
• Is most likely biology or chemistry trained.
• Does not find the astronomy part of the curriculum enticing
• Requires support to teach astronomy better
• Has three weeks every year to teach it
• Has about one week (of evenings or weekends) to prepare for it.
• Does not have the free time to fiddle with new software and techniques
• Does not have the capacity to install software or do anything particularly technical to students computers
• Is unlikely to be in a school with a particular focus on STEM or Astronomy.

How do we tackle this at NextAstro? How do we provide solutions to such a (potentially) daunting problem? Well, it is certainly not an entirely dire situation, there are many solutions. For instance, the year levels we are particularly interested in is that area before the last two years of high school (although perhaps a little earlier as well) where students are mature and adept enough but are not yet under higher pressure and may have not picked the direction of their senior years yet. It is also this area of the curriculum that, worldwide, tends to contain curriculum statements that are attractive and amenable to getting “pretty pictures” with telescopes to address the curriculum (Salimpour 2018).

Our research also recommends extending current curriculum into some “missing areas” of curriculum (Salimpour, Fitzgerald & Hollow 2024) that are not directly covered but necessary for a full general layperson’s understanding of the universe they live in, shown below. While these are currently suggestions (although hopefully over the next decades they are more adopted) about emphasis (rather than addition) in the curriculum, they are also able to be adapted into an interpretation of the current curriculum statements to make this area more coherent to teach.

We can provide professional development, training, mentoring, curriculum materials and telescope access for you and your students.

Our other area of particular focus to support those students who have decided (hopefully with our help!) to continue on in science into physics in their last two years of high school. This is a higher stakes situation but also a much more homogenous situation. Even more than lower high school, the topics in Senior Physics do tend to be very similar worldwide.

Preliminary results of our research show that students would be more likely to do physics if it was done in the context of astronomy and space sciences and that this effect is more prominent for females than males. As such, we have designed an approach to the Year 11/12 course – currently aligned to the Victorian and NSW curriculum – that covers the content of Senior Physics but as much within an astronomy and space science context as possible.

There are also many opportunities in various curriculum around the world for students to undertake extended projects of one manner or another. These tend to be more heterogenous but include things such as the NSW Science Extension (link) in year 11/12, Victorian Depth Studies, research projects in the International Baccaleureate or just during an astronomy elective. Some of these may be suited to one of our research projects and we are also available to mentor and guide through a larger curriculum area too!