The Finnish Cultural Foundation awarded us work grant in spring 2024 from Salli ja Kaarlo Merikoski’s foundation. With help of the grant, we toured Lapland schools from September 1st to 15th November 2024 and March 1st to May 15th 2025.
With the help of the grant, our visits to schools were free. The class had their own teacher always present in our programs. For each group we usually held 45-90 minutes of program, in which we told them about the night sky, toured the universe with help of computer simulation, demonstrated Kitsat educational nanosatellites and informed the youngsters about possibilities of working on the space sector.
We also offered the following lectures for larger groups, in for example the school auditorium:
- Exoplanets and life in space
- Manned spaceflight and the Artemis program
In large schools we usually held 6 lessons per day. In smaller schools the number of lessons varied more.
For some schools we also arranged stargazing in the evening time. From this map you can see the schools and a couple of other sites that we visited:
We held altogether 60 days of teaching and a couple of those invluded also stargazing in the evening. We visited 33 schools and a couple of other places and happenings, such as the School Science weeks in Arktikum. Our presenation was given to more than 3000 students and we drove more than 11 000 kilometers during our tour.
Here’s a listing of the places we visited. We started from Rovaniemi where we visited several large schools for several days and also the school science week.
Mikko ja Xiaoyun Suominen