This paper provides a brief overview of the many facets of astronomy education and heritage, and how the IAU stimulates them. Activities range from training in astronomy through scientific meetings and schools for young astronomers, to using astronomy as a tool for development and for stimulating science education at school level. Communicating astronomy with the public and engaging in outreach activities with children to inspire curiosity is yet another way of how astronomy can help build a literate society and install a sense of global citizenship. The involvement of many people at all levels is key to success.

I present three examples of IBSE (Inquiry-Based Science Education) type activities for students and teachers using data and resources from the Faulkes Telescope Project and the National Schools’ Observatory. Both projects have recently celebrated their 15th anniversary and both provide free access via the internet to 2-metre robotic telescopes to educational users throughout the World. Each activity contains supporting material and sample datasets in several aspects of astronomy as well as instructions on how to analyse data. These activities are designed to be ‘teacher-free’, extended projects for students.

They include the study of open clusters via astronomical images and population studies of exoplanets. I also present a Citizen Science project using data from Type Ia supernovae as discovered by the Gaia Alerts consortium. These data allow citizen scientists to develop their own Hubble Plot and begin to understand the link between Type Ia supernovae and the age of the Universe.

Despite the many amazing advances that have occurred in the space sciences (planetary science, heliophysics, astronomy, and cosmology) these subjects continue to play minor roles in pre-collegiate science education. Similarly, the Earth sciences are woefully under-represented in most school science programs – despite their vital relevance to our physical well-being. Some countries have educational standards that formally prioritize the Earth & space sciences as much as the physical and life sciences, but even they fail to actualize their mandated priorities. I contend that better coordination and advancement of Earth & space science education at the national, state, society, and educator levels would lead to better educational outcomes worldwide.

Active learning methodologies have been used to teach science, technology, engineering, arts and mathematics at higher education institutions in several countries. We report the results of using peer instruction in an Astronomy undergraduate course taught at a research university in Brazil. The course syllabus covered topics on astrometry and celestial mechanics at an introductory level and was offered in the second semester of 2018. In order to better investigate the effect of the interaction among students, we have asked them to talk to their peers after the first poll regardless of the outcome. We have then analyzed the outcomes of all peer instruction polls, before and after student interaction, as well as the course evaluation questionnaires answered by the students at the end of the semester. From these analyses we were able to establish an approximation between peer instruction and some key elements of Vygotsky’s social interactionist theory.

With this roundtable we wished to discuss about different topics related to research, innovation, scientific literacy and inclusion in Astronomy education, putting together the expertise of educators from all around the world. The present paper includes the introduction to the roundtable prepared by the chairs of the session as well as the contributions from several of the participants.

The “Right to the night sky” outreach project holds astronomy workshops for children and teens deprived of their liberty in juvenile detention centers. It is carried out by an interdisciplinary group of students, graduates, and teachers of Astronomy, Geophysics, Educational Science, Law, Psychology, Social Work, and Social Communication. It’s has been accredited and recognized by the Faculty of Astronomical and Geophysical Sciences, and the National University of La Plata (Argentina) since the year 2014. This work presents the diverse activities developed in the project, the methodologies used, and an analysis of how the project evolved, grew, and expanded over time, continuing what has already been presented by Charalambous et al. (2014) and Haack et al. (2019)

Two important strategies on astronomy education in the era of digital transformation proposed on this presentation are the uses of “Astronomy Literacy” and a “Deep Learning” through “Data Intensive Astronomy” to support astronomy education.

Astronomy literacy can create several thinking skills to young generation and public for promoting human capacity buildings on science and technology.

Nowadays, the astronomical data archives are impressively large and the “digital age” has made it easy to make the data available to astronomers, researchers, under graduate and graduate students and even to publics. Big data in astronomy has then played an important role in astronomy education both in higher education and school education. Astronomers and researchers can access “big data” for the deep learning through data intensive astronomy on their research works and school students and publics.

We hope to extend these strategies through regional and inter-regional collaboration to promote astronomy education in wider scale.

We here present the general outline of the project “Open up, Sky!”, a pilot project of astronomy education in a Juvenile detention institution in Sardinia, Italy. The project is still in progress, and we report here the first preliminary results.

Since January 2020, the International Astronomical Union has an Office of Astronomy for Education (OAE). The OAE, which joins the previously existing IAU Offices for Astronomy for Development (OAD), Astronomy Outreach (OAO) and Young Astronomers (OYA) is hosted at Haus der Astronomie, a center for astronomy education and outreach operated by the Max Planck Society in Heidelberg, Germany. This contribution outlines the mission of the OAE, the current state of the office, its background, mission and collaborative structure, as well as the activities that have already started or are planned for the future.

This is a preliminary survey of astronomy topics incorporated into the Malaysian national school syllabus. Topics directly relevant to astronomy are situated within the general science subject from Year 4 (age 10 years old) until Year 9 (age 15 years old) and are grouped under four main themes: Earth-Sun-Moon system, the Solar System, Stars, and Exploration of Outer Space. Contemporary topics such as exoplanets and astrobiology are not explicitly mentioned, but students are required to engage in hypothetical thinking by speculating on planetary diversity and its implications for life in the Universe. We characterize the astronomy content in the Malaysian national school syllabus to be life-centric and relatively open-ended.

This communication introduces two cases of the use of astronomy as a motivating context to interdisciplinary science education with emphasis on modeling activities. Firstly, a dedicated software, called SalsaJ, allows students to reproduce the same data analysis as made by astronomers. The case of exoplanet detection will be used as an exemple. Secondly, bodies of learners are considered to model movements of planets with a Human Orrery (a Spatio-Temporal Map of the Solar System), connecting thus mathematics, physics, geography and arts.

Galaxy Forum (GF) South America 2020, was held virtually on December 8, 2020 on the opening eve of IAU 367 by the International Lunar Observatory Association (ILOA Hawai’i) with the support of the Instituto de Tecnologías en Detección y Astropartículas (ITeDA, CNEA-CONICET-UNSAM) and IAU. Galaxy Forum is an education and outreach program sponsored by ILOA, an interglobal enterprise incorporated in Hawaii as a non-profit organization to expand human knowledge of the Cosmos through observation from our Moon and to participate in internationally cooperative lunar base build-out.

As a IAU-367 associated event, Galaxy Forum featured comments by Dr. Beatriz Garcia and presentations by ILOA Director Steve Durst (ILOA Hawai’i, USA), Marcelo Colazo (CONAE, Argentina); César Gonzalez García (CSIC, Spain); Li Geng (NAOC, China); Santiago Paolantonio (Córdoba Observatory, Argentina) and Margarita Safonova (IIA, India). In this contribution, the overview of the contributions permits an approach to the GF interests.

As the IAU heads towards its second century, many changes have simultaneously transformed Astronomy and the human condition world-wide. Amid the amazing recent discoveries of exoplanets, primeval galaxies, and gravitational radiation, the human condition on Earth has become blazingly interconnected, yet beset with ever-increasing problems of over-population, pollution, and never-ending wars. Fossil-fueled global climate change has begun to yield perilous consequences. And the displacement of people from war-torn nations has reached levels not seen since World War II.

Section 4 of the FM14 focus on the outreach action and advocacy in the context of IAUs 2020-2030 Strategic Plan. This paper also contains supplementary materials that point to contributed talks and poster presentations that can be found online.

The Indigenous Sky Stories Program may have the potential to deliver significant and long-lasting changes to the way science is taught to Year 5 and 6 primary school students. The context for this article is informed by research that shows that educational outcomes can be strengthened when Indigenous knowledge is given the space to co-exist with the hegemony of current western science concepts. This research presents a case study of one primary school involved in the Indigenous Sky Stories Program. It showcases how teachers and students worked in conjunction with their local community to implement the program. The results suggest that introducing cultural sky stories into the science program, engaged and primed Year 5 and 6 students to seek out additional sky stories and to investigate the astronomical content mapped to the National Science Curriculum. The involvement of Aboriginal elders and community enriched the experience for all involved. The integrated science program appears to generate positive engagement for both Indigenous students and their non-Indigenous peers. Additionally, the program provided a valuable template for teachers to emulate and which can act as a model for the requirement to include Indigenous perspectives in the new National Science Curriculum.

This paper outlines the extensive range of public programs offered by the Carter Observatory, including ‘public nights’, new planetarium and audio-visual shows, displays, the Carter Memorial Lectures, the annual Astronomical Handbook and other publications, a monthly newspaper column and three monthly radio programs. It also deals with the Observatory’s involvement in undergraduate and postgraduate astronomy at Victoria University of Wellington, various adult education training programs, ‘Overnight Extravaganzas’, holiday programs, and the recent development of the Education Service in response to the introduction of an astronomy curriculum into schools throughout New Zealand. Some possible future developments in the public astronomy and education areas are also discussed.

Astronomy is part of our culture. Astronomy cannot be isolated in a classroom, it has to be integrated in the normal life of teachers and students. “Astronomy in the city” is an important part of NASE (Network for Astronomy School Education) (Ros & Hemenway 2012). In each NASE course we introduce a “working group session” chaired by a local expert in cultural astronomy. The chair introduces several examples of astronomy in their city and after that, the participants have the opportunity to discuss and mention several similar examples. After this session all participants visit one or two sites proposed and introduced by the chair.

After more than 5 years using this method we visited and discovered several examples of astronomy in the city:

•Astronomy in ancient typical clothes.

•Archaeological temples oriented according to the sunrise or set.

•Petroglyphs with astronomical meaning.

•Astronomy in monuments.

•Sundials.

•Oriented Colonial churches.

•Astronomy in Souvenirs.

In any case, teachers and students discover that Astronomy is part of their everyday life. They can take into account the Sun's path when they park their car or when they take a bus “what is the best part in order to be seat in the shadow during the journey?” The result is motivation to go with “open eyes” when they are in the street and they try to get more and more information about their surroundings.

In summary, one of the main activities is to introduce local cultural aspects in NASE astronomy courses. The participants can discover a new approach to local culture from an astronomical point of view.

I shall present a series of easy demonstrations that can be carried out during formal astronomy lectures. Since astronomy is physics we have developed on Earth applied to celestial objects, there are many useful experiments that can be carried out with relative ease by physics teachers in order to help pupils grasp the workings of the universe and to relate them with every day experiences. One of the difficulties in teaching science is that we use two-dimensional pictures to explain a three-dimensional reality. Using models helps students understand some of the properties of celestial objects. Although it is important to have pupils experiment on their own, some demonstrations are so simple that it is enough to have the teacher carry them out during the lecture to have pupils grasp their importance or at least keep their attention focused on the topic at hand. The demonstrations can be used in elementary education as well as in introductory astronomy courses and teacher workshops.

The Charles Sturt University Remote Telescope Project aims to make available to primary school students and their teachers a simple-to-use telescope and CCD camera set up over the Internet. Access to the telescope is supported by a 10 week curriculum unit of Astronomy activities. The telescope is not a robotic device. It is controllable in real time with images being transmitted to the user also in real time. Visitors to the site are able to view what is happening at the telescope without being able to take control of it. This paper describes the project, the software control system and the related curriculum activities. Discussion centres around how to ignite students' and teachers' interest in science and how projects such as this one may lead to more exciting coverage of important topics in the primary and lower secondary schools.

Teaching an astronomy course online involves many challenges. One major challenge is the design of appropriate, practical and challenging forms of assessment which focus both on the astronomy content of the course and on the particular astronomy interests of the enrollees. This paper will discuss the assessment approaches we have chosen for our introductory-level subjects, the outcomes obtained and the reactions of the course participants. In particular, some of the wide variety of project work undertaken by the participants will be described.