Youth AAAP takes astronomy and history of science into Trenton classrooms
by Eklavya , Hasan, and Maiya
This summer, three members of the Youth AAAP community took astronomy out of the observatory and into the classrooms of students in Trenton, New Jersey. As part of Dare to Discover’s partnership with Mercer Street Friends, Eklavya, Hasan, and Maiya conducted a series of astronomy and history of science workshops at two Trenton schools: Martin Luther King Jr. Middle School and Cadwalader Elementary School.
The workshops were designed with a single goal in mind: to make every student in the room feel that the universe and science explorations are possible by everyone, and anyone.
Sundials and the Art of Reading Time
At both schools, students got their hands on one of humanity’s oldest scientific instruments – the sundial. Not a museum piece, and not a diagram in a textbook. They built their own, from scratch, using nothing but paper, a pencil, and a ruler.
Each student drew a clock face on paper, marked the hours, and stood a pencil upright at the center as a gnomon. Then came the magic moment: using a mobile phone flashlight as a proxy for the sun to see how shadows of the pencil help tell time of the day! For many of the students, it was the first time they had connected the position of the sun to the measurement of time in a way they could see with their own eyes.
The activity connected directly to the story of Eratosthenes, who used the very same principle, a stick and its shadow, to calculate the circumference of the Earth in 240 BC, and got it right to within 1%. Students who had just built their first sundial suddenly understood exactly how he had done it.
Nebulae, Galaxies, and the Andromeda Conversation
No astronomy workshop is complete without looking at what is actually out there. Using projected deep-space imagery, Eklavya, Hasan, and Maiya walked students through 3 of the most spectacular objects in the observable universe: the Pillars of Creation, the Carina Nebula, and the Andromeda Galaxy.
The Andromeda Galaxy prompted some of the most memorable responses. When the students learned that Andromeda is 2.5 million light-years away and yet visible to the naked eye on a clear dark night, several of them were immediately curious to look for it.
One student at the Cadwalader Elementary School asked what happens when galaxies collide. That question, unprompted and perfectly formed, was exactly the kind of moment these workshops are designed to create.
The James Webb Deep Field image drew perhaps the biggest reaction. When students were told that every single point of light in that image is an entire galaxy containing hundreds of billions of stars, the room went very quiet for a moment. Then the questions started.
Ancient Minds, Modern Classrooms
Alongside the hands-on activities and the imagery, the workshops introduced students to astronomers and scientists from the ancient world whose names rarely appear in school textbooks. Students heard about Eratosthenes, who calculated the size of the Earth by using a stick. And about Aryabhata, who proposed that the Earth rotates on its own axis more than a millennium before Europe accepted the idea.
For students in Trenton, many of whom come from communities whose scientific heritage is rarely reflected in mainstream curricula, these stories carry a particular resonance. The message was simple: science has never belonged to one country or one century. It belongs to everyone. And it always has.
What Came Next
The response from students and from the Mercer Street Friends program coordinators was genuinely warm. The feedback from the Students, Mercer Street Friends as well as Martin Luther King Middle School Staff and Calwalader Elementary Staff has been very warm, and that students have been inquisitive and curious to learn more.
These workshops represent exactly the kind of outreach that Youth AAAP was founded to deliver.
We are grateful to AAAP for the encouragement, resources, and community that have made programs like this possible.
Amateur Astronomers Association of Princeton 