As part of our Open Education Week activities, Charlie caught up with Leam Howe, about the SatSchool Earth Observation outreach programme. Leam is one of the University of Edinburgh PhD Researchers involved in running the SatSchool programme.  SatSchool create educational resources and take them out to schools in order as part of education outreach on worldwide geography, ecosystems, climate and the impacts of human activity through satellite observation, and using materials created by current researchers.

The programme was originally designed and delivered by PhD students from SENSE Earth Observation CDT, a centre funded by the Natural Research Council and the UK Space Agency to tackle cross-disciplinary environmental problems, by applying state-of-the-art data science methods to the deluge of satellite data collected each day. The program now has members from a range of education and scientific institutions.

Charlie Farley  
Hi Leam, could you tell us a bit about yourself and your research?

Leam Howe 

I’m a PhD student here at Edinburgh University. I’m part of the SENSE CDT (Satellite Data in Environmental Science – Centre for Doctoral Training. I study snow in Scotland, using a mixture of remote sensing and modelling. I worked a lot on snow mapping from Sentinel 2 data and now am trying to improve models to better capture the fine scale variability of snow in the Cairngorms.

Charlie Farley
What is SatSchool and how did you get involved?

Leam Howe 
A group of PhD students made the SatSchool resources in response to a NERC grant for creating educational resources. Four students put the initial grant application in together and recruited others volunteers to make the first outreach education resources. I heard about it and got involved in further development and tying it in line with curriculums. It’s largely a volunteer basis, applying to grants to keep paying for the development and delivering of the resources.

The SENSE CDT partners include The University of Edinburgh, the University of Leeds, the British Antarctic Survey down in Cambridge and people from the National Oceanography Centre as well. The first couple of years we were all from the SENSE CDT programme, but then we had to try and think about how to make this work after the program ends. So, we brought in volunteers from other places including the University of Stirling, Strathclyde, and Aberdeen.

We have a board, which I chaired last year, and just set up a steering committee with SatSchool alumni, staff of the different universities, and other interested parties to try and keep it going long term.

Charlie Farley  
Fab! We’re interested in the way that research is being used to create these education resources for schools. Was any of the research that you’ve been involved in tied into the resources that then went out to the schools?

Leam Howe  
Yes. All the modules are made from areas of research of people on the PhD programme. We haven’t developed a snow module yet though, unfortunately. But we did make the cryosphere modules, and I helped in the development of that as I’m part of the cryosphere group here at Edinburgh with leading researchers in remote sensing of glaciers.

Charlie Farley 
Had you done any teaching or creating for this education level before? Did you have any feedback from the teachers involved in the project?

Leam Howe  
No. I’ve done some tutoring, but in terms of teaching or making the resources, that was a learning curve.

SatSchool collaborated with teachers to ask what they are looking for and how to align with the curriculum. Every time we go into a school, or if we spend time developing another part of the resources, we try to get feedback from a teacher.

We just did some translations into Gaelic last year as well to be more accessible.

Charlie Farley  
Oh, brilliant, I’d love to be able to add those to our collection!

We don’t have all the SatSchool resources on our TES school resources sharing site yet, but the two we do have are ‘Introduction to Earth Observation’ which has been downloaded 342 times, and ‘Hands-on with Climate Data’ which has been downloaded 296 times.

Leam Howe  
Wow, cool! Quite nice to hear that people are using those resources! This is something we’re not very good at, it’s just a black box to us because we don’t have analytics on the website, so I don’t really know how much they’re reaching people, but that’s great.
And we’d be very happy to give you the other modules. We’ve done a lot of work on refining and making them classroom ready.

Charlie Farley 
Do you go out to the school with these resources yourself?

Leam Howe  
I’ve been to a couple of different schools in Edinburgh, Leith Academy was one of them. We’ll go and do several classes in a row, often with a mixture of age groups, abilities, and educational needs. Learning to shift how you pitch it is a challenge that I had not come across before.
It was super interesting going into schools, and definitely a trial by fire the first time. [Laughs]

Charlie Farley  
How did how did you find the students responded to the resources?

Leam Howe  
Oh, it’s such a mixed bag every time. There’s always, in all the classes I’ve gone to, there’s at least a few people who are super engaged, and those who want to be cool and won’t pay attention. But I feel if you’re getting a few people who come up to you afterwards and are like, “oh, that was so cool!”. That’s just really rewarding.

I used to live in Leith and a primary school invited us to their summer fair. We have a floor map we use for a ‘Treasure hunt from space’ and when some of the kids get super into it and you’re just on the floor with them trying to spot stuff, yeah, it’s fun.

Charlie Farley  
Oh neat! Are there any other play activities in the resources you really enjoyed?

Leam Howe
We have a memory game where you’re meant to match the tiles, you turn them over look at them and turn them back. But it has a twist, where you’re looking at before and after satellite scenes, so you need to match the before and afters, and then identify a reason why it’s changed, like a volcanic eruption, deforestation or glaciers changing.
I really enjoy that one with an older age groups. They’re interested in finding out why it’s changed, and why you get false colour composites instead of just true colour RGB images.

Charlie Farley  
Do you know if any if this is being used in any reporting to demonstrate impact of your research?

Leam Howe  
I don’t think so. No, no.

Charlie Farley  
Maybe you should because this is real impact that’s going out into the communities that’s coming from the active research that you’re all doing.

Leam Howe  
Yeah, one really great thing that happened, I don’t know if you know, UK Space Agency headed up the Committee on Earth Observation Satellites last year. They did an international outreach project and they used the SatSchool resources. So yeah, it’s nice to have those little wins.

Charlie Farley  
Do you see this as something that you’ll be taking on with you after you finish your doctorate? Will you be continuing this kind of outreach activity?

Leam Howe  
I’d love to do some form of it. It’s been rewarding to go to conference with it too. We went to Vienna last year to present at the ESA (European Space Agency) Living Planet Symposium. So now we’re engaging with ESA’s outreach project as well.

There have been a lot of collaborations and overlapping interest with different people. In Edinburgh I spoke with someone who does graphic design for the space industry, and recently I had a conversation with someone from SaxaVord Spaceport up on the Shetlands because of the overlapping outreach interests.

Being involved in the project has given me a better picture of the industry as a whole.

Charlie Farley  
Would you recommend that other folks get involved in outreach if they have the opportunity?

Leam Howe  
Definitely, it reminds you how interesting what you do is. I think sometimes because it’s just another thing on the side amongst your other commitments as an academic it could seem too much. But you’re meeting people and creating connections.
It’s also good to take a step back from the nitty gritty details of the science and be like, oh, this is actually quite cool what we’re all doing. And it’s fun to share with other people.

| SENSE Earth Observation CDT

| Leam Howe

| SatSchool Outreach Hub

| SatSchool Earth Observation OER on Tes.com

| Committee on Earth Observation Satellites

| CEOS Youth Hub

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