ARCturus

EAAE is an international organization for supporting astronomy teaching. It arranges summer schools which, together with the websites, support teachers and provide them information they need in their astronomy teaching. The summer schools have been available in various European countries for over 20 years. In addition to them, EAAE has arranged short courses as well as courses with special topics in various European countries as supplementary education for the teachers.

A good example of the course supply is the series of observation events that was arranged in many European countries during the Venus transit in 2012 (Venus Transit Programme). This celestial phenomenon aroused a lot of interest, rare as it is: the next transit will happen after one hundred years. The astronomical organizations, EAAE included, gathered information and data on this rare phenomenon on their websites.

This is how the news of the event was released in Finland:

In June 2012, it was possible to observe Venus Transit in Finland. It could be seen in Lapland on June 6, early in the morning. Due to this, the Finnish organizers, together with the EAAE training group, arranged a four-day course from June 4 to June 7 in Enontekiö, Lapland. There were 16 participants of which 3 from abroad.

The websites (www.eaae-astronomy.org) are constantly updated and they provide the schools with the latest research results as well as many kinds of instructions and course entities for various school grades.  For continuous training of astronomy teachers, the website consists of a wide programme including materials and information on the teacher network. EAAE files the valuable materials of the courses. On the websites, teaching materials of the summer schools and short courses are available for the teachers to use in their teaching.

 

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