Planets in a Room: an educational tool for Europlanet

Planets in a room (PIAR) is a DIY kit to build a small, lowcost spherical planet simulator and planetarium projector. Teachers, science communicators that run a small museum or planetarium, planetary scientists, amateur astronomers and other individuals can easily build it and use it on their own, to show and teach the Earth and other planets and to develop and share material with a growing online community. Having started in 2017 with a first version made using 3d-printed technology, PIAR has lately gone green, with a new wooden, plastic-free version of the kit. (http://www.planetsinaroom.net/)

The project has been developed by the italian non-profit association Speak Science, with the collaboration of the Italian National Institute for Astrophysics (INAF) and the Roma Tre University, Dipartimento di Matematica e Fisica.

It was funded by the Europlanet Outreach Funding Scheme in 2017 and was presented to the scientific community at EPSC and other scientific Congresses in the following years. Today, it is being distributed to an increasing number of schools, science museum and research institutions. PIAR is also one of the projects selected by the Europlanet Society for education and public outreach of planetary science: in 2020, it is being distributed to the 12 Europlanet Regional Hubs all around Europe, to be used in a number of educational projects.

In this talk we will review the state of the art of the project presenting a selection of educational material and projects that have been developed for PIAR by scientists, teachers and communicators and that are focused on planetary science and on planetary habitability.

 

Acknowledgements

We acknowledge for this project the vast community of amateur and professionals that is actively working on innovative educational systems for astronomy such as planetarium and virtual reality projects (both hardware and software). Planets in a room is based on the work of this vast community of people and their experiences and results. We also acknowledge Europlanet for funding this work: the project Europlanet 2024 RI has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 871149.”

 

References

Giacomini L., Aloisi F., De Angelis I., “Planets in a room”, EPSC Abstracts Vol. 11, EPSC2017-280, 2017

Giacomini L., Aloisi F., De Angelis I., Capretti S., “Planets in a Room: a DIY, low-cost educational kit”, EPSC Abstracts Vol. 12, EPSC2018-254, 2018

Giacomini L., Aloisi F., De Angelis I., Capretti S., “Planets on (low-cost) balloons”, EPSC AbstractsVol. 13, EPSC-DPS2019-1243-1, 2019

Giacomini L., Aloisi F., De Angelis I., Capretti S, “(Green) Planets in a Room”, EGU General Assembly 2020, Online, 4–8 May 2020, EGU2020-22153, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu2020-22153, 2020