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A.E. Schweitzer (Little Thompson Observatory), T.T. Melsheimer (Meridian Controls and LTO)
The Little Thompson Observatory is the first community-built observatory that is part of a high school and accessible to other schools remotely, via the Internet. This observatory is the second member of the Telescopes in Education (TIE) project. Construction of the building was done completely by volunteer labor, and first light occurred in May 1999. The observatory is located on the grounds of Berthoud High School in northern Colorado.
We are grateful to have received an IDEAS grant to provide teacher training workshops for K-12 schools to make use of the observatory, including remote observing from classrooms. Students connect to the observatory over the Internet, and then receive the images back on their local computers.
A committee of teachers and administrators from the Thompson School District have selected these workshops to count towards Incentive Credits (movement on the salary schedule) because the course meets the criteria: “Learning must be directly transferable to the classroom with students and relate to standards, assessment and/or technology.” In addition, this past summer our program became an accredited course by Colorado State University.
Our next project is to partner with the Discovery Center Science Museum and Colorado State University to provide additional teacher education programs.
Our training materials have also been shared with TIE/Mt. Wilson, NASA Goddard and Howard University, which are working together to develop a similar teacher education program.
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Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, 34, #4
© 2002. The American Astronomical Soceity.