EO Detective in Lockdown

Catherine Fitzsimons, our NCEO Outreach Officer, describes the legacy of an outreach project from NCEO at the University of Leicester.

In 2015–16 the National Centre for Earth Observation, based in the School of Physics and Astronomy, received outreach funding from the UK Space Agency to produce educational materials that would tie in to British ESA astronaut Tim Peake’s Principia mission. The Natural Environment Research Council provided some additional support for the work carried out in 2015, and UKSA provided further funding to take the project, known as EO Detective, forward into 2017.

We were determined that the work should have a legacy so, as well as running a competition to capitalise on the publicity surrounding the mission, we produced:

• curriculum-linked classroom resources that would provide an Earth observation context for teaching some core concepts or/and skills in maths, science, geography and computing
• an i-Pad game (working with Bulb Studios in Leicester) for younger children
• a ‘grown-up’ version of the colouring booklet that formed the backbone of one of the curriculum activities
• ideas for table-top games based on a set of print and play cards showcasing stunning  images of the Earth from space.

The resources are all free and available through the EO Detective blog or/and STEM Learning and, during the mission and for a while after, the dedicated Principia website (now offline). Technical issues mean that we have no idea how many times each resource was downloaded from the latter site, or from the STEM Learning website between mid-December 2015 and mid-April 2016 – the very time we would have expected numbers to peak!

However, data provided in the run-up to the mission, and regularly ever since, shows the classroom materials were well-received and that teachers continue to download them. The reason for this is suggested by a comment in a review of space education resources carried out by ESERO-UK: ‘The Earth Observation resources from EO detective are some of the best that have been reviewed as they have been intentionally mapped to the current curriculum with outcomes that are in line with teacher’s expectations at each level.’

During lockdown, it seems the materials have also proved popular with parents – in part, no doubt, because some have been highlighted by the STEM website. Even allowing for the fact that many of the downloads over the last few months will have resulted in only one or two children carrying out the activities – rather than thirty or more – the data suggests that well over 150,000 students have interacted with our resources. We believe the figure is actually even higher because some activities have been made available through other routes (in resource packs for teacher training and to support the Scouts’ Astronautics activity badge, for example), and because teachers who have used them successfully with one class will use them again in subsequent years without another download.

So, more than five years after the outreach project began, and three years after it last received any funding, it continues to introduce Earth observation to new audiences – a legacy indeed!