WorldWide Telescope in Education

The American Astronomical Society’s WorldWide Telescope (WWT) is a visualization program that enables a computer to function as a virtual telescope—bringing together archival imagery from the world’s best ground- and space-based telescopes for the exploration of the universe. It is a powerful resource for astronomy education. In this chapter, we describe curricula developed by the authors that use WWT in teaching key topics in Astro 101 and K–12 science, including parallax, Hubble’s Law and large-scale structure in the universe, seasons, Moon phases and eclipses, and life in the universe. We also demonstrate how WWT can be used in open-ended student research projects. Where available, we share education research results showing student-learning outcomes from these WWT-based resources.

Udomprasert, P., Goodman, A., Ladd, E., Offner, S., Houghton, H., Johnson, E., Sunbury, S., Plummer, J.D., Wright, E., Sadler, P., Rosenfield, P., & Wong, C. (2019). WorldWide Telescope in Education. In C. Impey & S. Buxner (Eds.), Astronomy Education - A Practitioner’s Guide to the Research. Bristol, UK: IOP Publishing.