MOMSTER, a Europlanet-funded public engagement project

In May 2020, Europlanet Society launched a call to fund projects to engage the public with planetary science. Our project proposal called MOMSTER: MObile Meteor STation for Education & outReach was amongst the three projects that were granted.

MOMSTER aims at developing a Meteor Education Kit as a resource for STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, Mathematics) teachers in secondary schools. The kit includes a mobile radio meteor station consisting of a dedicated antenna and radio receiver, as well as an educational package to learn all about meteors and their detection methods, while at the same time conveying a fascination for the ephemeral beauty and complexity of these natural light shows. The project goals are stimulating STEAM (ultimately resulting in nudging future career choices towards science or engineering career paths) and the use of citizen science (especially the Radio Meteor Zoo initiative on the online citizen science platform Zooniverse) at schools, and reaching the general public.

The development of educational resources builds upon preliminary experiences we gained by participating in an Erasmus+ project called BRITEC (Bringing Research into ThE Classroom), in which teachers and pupils participated in the Radio Meteor Zoo activity.  We are presently in a pilot phase where three Belgian schools (two Dutch speaking and one French speaking) test the mobile radio meteor station and the educational resources, and give their feedback.

We are using STEAM-education as an approach to broaden our target group towards less scientifically oriented students. We do this by developing an educational resource on visual (science) communication. We also organized an art & design competition for high school students with more than 30 submissions. The best piece of art will decorate the ‘MOMSTER boxes’ we use for transport of the radio receivers.