Education and Outreach

This Core Function ensures that the value and outputs from SciServer are made aware and available to the wider scientific communities, though a series of outreach, training and educational activities.  In particular, we will build on and extend the student notebook available in SkyServer to greatly expand it’s capabilities and make it applicable and available to science domains beyond Astronomy.

Specific objectives of the Core Function include:

• Develop a clear brand: Build on the success, reputation and ‘name’ of SkyServer to encapsulate a clear brand that caters to the wider scientific community with a new set of data intensive capabilities.
• Outreach and communication: Ensure that the value of SciServer is well communicated, and that scientific communities are included in the definition of priorities and capabilities, and subsequent evaluation, for SciServer throughout the project
• Development of a Student Notebook: A student-teacher, multi-discipline educational application that integrates directly to the major managed data sets within SciServer, allowing managed assignments to be developed, undertaken and assessed based on activities surrounding data visualization, analysis, all in a highly interactive and fun environment.
• Organizing and Running Summer Schools
• Organizing and running teacher/training workshops  
• Collating user feedback and usage patterns about the system and its services