First GalileoMobile Conference

at the Museum of Astronomy and Related Sciences,

Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; October 10-14, 2016.

It has been already 8 years since the GalileoMobile project started to bring activities related with astronomy to children and to the public from all over the world. To evaluate the outcomes, as well as the project’s history and future, the First GalileoMobile General Conference was realized between October 10th to 14th, 2016, event that took place at the Museum of Astronomy and Related Sciences (MAST) in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

The main goal of this meeting was to bring the team together to discuss about several subjects that happened back in the past, to think over about our current status, and to explore new ideas that may be implemented in the future. We looked backwards these 8 years of activities and evaluated our achievements in the light of the outcomes of the expeditions, the public reached and the publications produced so far. Special attention was given to the numerous lessons learned along all these years, which allowed us to improve our performance from one expedition to another as well as to establish GalileoMobile as a well and worldwide recognized outreach project. We also revised our goals and established new ones, besides a new vision for the project, taking the present scenario of the team into account, in which members are now spread all over the world. This helped us to identify organizational issues and to propose solutions, such as more autonomy for the regional nodes and the task forces, more flexibility in the format of the expeditions and the creation of a new task force to give support to external initiatives interested in organizing similar projects.

Aside the GalileoMobile members and collaborators, several specialists were invited to share their knowledge and expertise with us in different topics, including science education and outreach, sustainability and development, cultural and etno-astronomy, approaches to work with visually impaired people and the inquiry-based learning methodology (in which our Handbook of activities is based on). This allowed fruitful moments for discussion and exchange of ideas. Besides that, during the conference, two workshops on the GalileoMobile handbook of activities and an ethnographic analysis of our Light-Year documentary were offered.

The pictures of the conference can be found in this link https://www.flickr.com/photos/museudeastronomia/sets/72157674347010202

This encounter was a highlight in the GalileoMobile history. If you got curious to know more about the outcome of the conference and the project, you are welcome to join us in this great adventure.