Stars for Schools

The Stars for Schools project will bring the astrophysics of stars into the lives of about 150 students over three years at our partner schools. Through collaborative exercises and short research projects using the Window to the Stars software on cost-effective Raspberry Pi computers, the Stars for Schools programme teaches the mathematics and physics needed to understand stars to students who have little or no experience with scientific research.

It also introduces students to Python coding to solve real science-research problems involving genuine astronomical data, much of the generation of which was funded by STFC. While Stars for Schools focuses on the astrophysics part of STFC's science, the skills our students learn, particularly in research-project work, apply also more generally to all STFC's science goals.

This application is development stage two of the Stars for Schools programme after a successful pilot which has run during the academic years 2020/21 and 2021/22. Our first aim is to spread the programme to new-partner schools, of which we already have 12, 42% of which are in areas with first-third Polar4 quintiles. Additionally, in parallel to expanding our existing programme for 15-17-year-old students with newly-developed resources for teachers, we will extend Stars for Schools to students aged 11-14 and provide a clear path to using our programme in physics teaching from ages 11 to 17.

We are already working with the Royal Astronomical Society and the Royal Society to promote the program through their teaching and outreach platforms. If stage two is successful, our long-term goal is to offer and support Stars for Schools through further outreach programmes like Isaac Physics.

Stars for Schools also provides a unique opportunity for university research students, e.g. PhD students, many of whom are funded by STFC, to gain essential experience in public engagement and education as mentors to our school students. By matching universities to local schools the programme establishes a foundation for future collaboration and communication, the goal of which is to encourage school students to take up STEM subjects at university.

The Stars for Schools programme includes material from two of STFC's five public-engagement themes: Big Telescopes and Big Data and Computing. The projects offered in the programme use real data from big telescopes and show that we need astrophysical models of stars to understand such data and get full value from the investment in telescopic hardware.

We also introduce our students to using computer code, in the form of short Python programs, to solve real scientific problems. In most cases this will be the first time the students have used a computer for such a task, so we are really introducing them to research at a young age and hopefully inspiring them to use computers in their own future scientific studies, be that at university or in industry.

During the pilot programme, our students pointed out that there is no opportunity within the curriculum to combine physics, mathematics and computer-science skills together, and that this project offered them this. Development of such science capital is a key positive aspect of Stars for Schools.