Presentation 1 : Oral/Invited
Status report of PL-HOU and very low cost CCD systems
Lech Mankiewicz and Grzegorz Wrochna
The Hands on Universe has just started as education project in Polish
schools. It seems to be an ideal tool to promote advanced technology
and scientific thinking among students. The leading Polish research
institutions - Copernicus Astronomical Center and Center for
Theoretical Physics - have offered their full support to the project,
while the Ministry for Education is still weighting its response to
the PL-HOU initiative.
In order to increase interest in the program, we propose to introduce
it together with an additional package based on a low cost webcam
which allows students to take their own pictures of the sky and
process them acording to methods they have learned in the HOU. In this
way students are able to discover themselves that sky is a dynamical,
variable system at additional cost of no more than Euro 150 per
setup. Exchanging experience and data through participation in the
network of affordable school CCD observatories further promotes
technological and social skills needed to survive in the era of
globalisation.