Friday 8 February 2013

First post!

As part of our recent efforts to modernise telescope.org, I now have a blog.

Let me start by introducing myself a little. My name is Edward Hand and my job at the telescope is primary schools outreach.



The BRT does a lot of work with schools in the area, inspiring pupils with practical science through practical astronomy. As such my job is to take bookings from schools and then to go to the schools to run workshops with the kids. This is a job shared by Antonio.

I have been in this role for almost 18 months now, however my history with the telescope project goes back further than this. For many years prior to getting my current position, I worked as a volunteer at the BRT over the summer holidays. This started while I was at secondary school and  continued when I went to university. My work was centred around programming and development of resources for the schools website such as games, animations and interactive, educational applets to teach complex ideas. You might also have used my flash FITS viewer to look at your images.

I enjoy my work with schools and find it very rewarding but in my free time programming is my real passion. I have no formal training (having studied physics at university) but it has been a big hobby of mine since I was about 12 years old. I like to help out with development wherever the opportunity arises and I imagine this will feature a lot in my blog.