The first Go-Lab summer school was carried out in Volos, Greece from July 30th to August 4th 2013 in parallel with the Discover the Cosmos summer school and the Discover the Cosmos Conference. The Participants came from different European countries, from Portugal to Estonia and from Greece to Greenland, thus forming a diverse multicultural team of teachers, who shared their experiences and ideas throughout the six days of the training course.

Prior to coming to Volos, all 30 participants were asked to create their own educational activities as a preparation, using on-line labs from the Go-Lab pool of on-line labs, as well as other digital resources and design them based on the inquiry teaching approach. During their stay in Volos, the participants had the opportunity to acquire a deeper knowledge and understanding of the inquiry based teaching approach through several presentations and discussions, while they also had the opportunity to learn about interesting on-line labs, like the Faulkes network of robotic telescopes and the HYPATIA data analysis tool for manipulating real data derived from the ATLAS detector at CERN. The introduction of on-line labs and additional tools, as well as the discussions on the inquiry teaching approach, allowed teachers to further upgrade the educational activities they had prepared, restructure them in order to make them more effective and further enrich them with digital resources.

Additionally, participants engaged in a Go-Lab participatory design workshop, during which they had a chance to learn more about the Go-Lab project and its current activities. The teachers got acquainted with the philosophy of Go-Lab and were introduced to the mock-ups, designed to represent the future Go-Lab Inquiry Learning Spaces, as well as the scaffolds and tools deployed in the process. During the workshop, the Go-Lab team was pleased to receive not only plenty of feedback and ideas from the participating teachers, but also their excitement about what was presented and their will to participate in the pilot phases of the project beginning next year.

Besides working with on-line labs and their educational activities, participants also had the opportunity to take part in the Discover the Cosmos conference and attend many interesting lectures, while they also participated in numerous other events that were part of the course, like the observation of the night sky from the mountain Pelion, a visit to the archeological museum of Volos, a virtual visit at the ATLAS control center at CERN and a Science Café at the ‘Milies’ traditional village.

On the last day of the summer course, all the participants had the chance to present their work and the educational activities they had worked on. The tutors and hosts of the summer school bit a fair well to the participants on August 4th, sending them off full of newly acquainted knowledge and happy memories, while promising to meet again in the future endeavors of the Go-Lab project.

For more information visit our Summer Schools website: http://golab.ea.gr

Article by Eleftheria Tsourlidaki (EA)