Founded in 2003, the Connecticut-based company used the NSF grant to develop its Online Telescope for Teachers using live feeds of telescopes across the globe owned and operated by Slooh. The company’s team of astronomers, along with a network of teachers and a teaching advisory board, have created 55 learning activities and counting.
“We’ve made it possible for an unlimited number of students to access and control these telescopes together in a way that is really more interesting and educational than if you were to try to control or look through a telescope as a solitary experience,” Paolucci told Government Technology, explaining that the Online Telescope for Teachers is more of a social experience, where one person controls the telescope but everyone in the community can view it.
Accessible through a web browser, Slooh first launched a version of its online telescope tool for students in the 2020-2021 academic year, having curated a list of the top 1,000 things to see in space and designed learning activities around them, Paolucci said.
The impetus for creating a more convenient version of this platform for classroom use was multilayered, according to Paolucci. Namely, he said most students live in urban, light-polluted areas in which telescopes don't work well. On top of that, observatories are expensive, traditionally only accessible to high-end private or charter schools, and field trips would require bringing students back to school at night.
“The beauty of these telescopes is they are situated all over the world, so the time zone change makes it possible for schools to be doing it in the classroom live (and online), as well as making it easy for kids to do some homework, because you don’t have to stay up all night,” he said.
A third reason was the burgeoning space industry.
“There are all these job opportunities coming in the space industry, and the problem is that most kids are not going to have access to those jobs unless they have some exposure to these things early enough that they become aware of them, that they develop a passion and curiosity about it,” Paolucci said. “What this online telescope does is it suddenly makes all of this capability accessible equally to everyone around the world, whereas before it just wasn’t."
In order to control the telescope, a user would make a reservation and then, during their allotted time, control and point the telescope at a location of their choosing, with all other users able to view that live feed online. Paolucci said students being able to control a telescope makes for a more hands-on, personalized experience as the platform walks them through what is visible. He likened the online telescope to a campfire, with people sitting around looking at different telescopes moving every five or 10 minutes, pondering and listening to audio recordings about what they're seeing.
“You have to understand how the night sky operates, you’re collecting that data, and when you collect it, and there’s all these activities to manipulate it once you have collected them,” he said. “It’s like your personal travel log and it means something to you, and you get a lot of empowerment from that.”
Slooh’s news release said its online telescope has gotten notice in the ed-tech space from the National Science Teaching Association and the advertising platform Catapult X, with its Educators Pick Best of STEM 2021 awards. The telescope is being used in about 500 schools and is available to schools worldwide, with lessons for 4th grade up to college.
