1Thrace Amateur Astronomy Club

Astronomy, through both the allure of the sky and popular culture, enjoys significant penetration into the public and especially the young. Furthermore, the interdisciplinary character of the field makes it an ideal avenue for teaching basic scientific principles in a context that is both relevant to the subject and interesting to the learners. Nevertheless, communicating astronomy to the public presents certain significant challenges: (a) highly specialized scientific knowledge needs to be disseminated to an audience of a disperse scientific background, often without extended and/or uniform scientific education and skills; (b) the audience is widely dispersed in age, preferences and goals regarding their pursuit of astronomy knowledge; and (c) the audience, consisting mostly of volunteer adults, has a diverse daily time-schedule while scattered over a region considerably larger than a university campus. Most importantly, considering the amateur, sideline nature of public astronomy education, the whole educational procedure needs to be a leisure activity rather than formal learning. Thus in contemporary physical science and astronomy education, educational programs increasingly include problem-based learning and other small group instructional models, collaborative organizations to support student-faculty interactions, and technology-enhanced educational tools. This paper seeks t