Network for Astronomy School Education

Network for Astronomy School Education (NASE) is an International Astronomical Union (IAU) Working Group that works on Training Teachers for primary and secondary schools. In 2007, professor George K. Miley, IAU vice-president, invited Rosa M. Ros to begin exploring the idea of setting up an astronomy program to give primary and secondary school teachers a better preparation in this area of knowledge. The birth of NASE Group occurred when Rosa Maria Ros and Alexandre Costa were sent by UNESCO and IAU to give two courses in Peru and Ecuador in July 2009. Shortly after NASE was officially created on August 2009 during IAU's General Assembly at Rio de Janeiro. From there on more than 80 courses have been presented worldwide.

Network for Astronomy School Education

Abbreviation	NASE
Formation	2009
President	Rosa Maria Ros
Vice-President	Beatriz Garcia
Website	www.iau.org/science/scientific_bodies/working_groups/259/

The topics of "the basic NASE course" are:

• Positional astronomy
• Solar System
• Exoplanets
• Spectrography
• Photometry
• Spectroscopy
• Determination of absolute magnitude
• Stellar nucleosynthesis
• Stellar evolution
• Cosmology

NASE classes were designed for developing countries where teachers don't have many financial resources. NASE Working Group members go to these countries for the first time to prepare a local task group that will disseminate astronomy knowledge and inexpensive didactic materials. The main goal is precisely to set up in each country a local group of NASE members who carry on teaching the essential NASE course[1] every year and to create new didactic inexpensive experiments, demonstrations and astronomical instruments. This has allowed to build a very large repository of educational materials for astronomy with PowerPoint Presentations[2]], animations, articles and lectures,[3] photos, games, simulations websites,[4] interactive programs(e.g. Stellarium[5]) and videos.