About Us

The Plates for Education (Scotland) programme began in 2018 with funding from the University of St Andrews. The aim of the programme is to extend the original US-based Plates for Education programme to Scotland, with activities that are aligned with the curriculum, and through specific professional development sessions for teachers in Scotland.

Our goal is to bridge classroom learning and contemporary research with our beautiful and unique plug plates.

We ran our first workshop in 2019, at the Dundee Science Centre. We, and the world, paused during 2020 and we resumed workshops, online, in Nov 2021. We currently run 2 or 3 workshops a year, where teachers are given a plate to take to their School. Please get in touch if you would like to know when our next workshops are.

We currently have a network of over 100 schools in Scotland in possession of an SDSS plate.

People

The programme is led by Dr Rita Tojeiro from the University of St Andrews, in collaboration with Dr Paula Miles (School of Psychology and Neuroscience) and Dr Anne-Marie Weijmans (School of Physics and Astronomy). From 01/2020 to 01/2024 the project was managed by Simon Reynolds as the Outreach Officer for the School of Physics and Astronomy. The project is or has been financed by SDSS, the Ogden Trust, STFC, and the University of St Andrews.

Many undergraduate students at the University have contributed to the programme, and to the development of educational activities based on SDSS data in general. If you’re an undergraduate student wishing to get involved, please get in touch.

Beatriz Moraes Schlittler (Undergraduate summer internship student, 2024). Bea constructed the initial version of this website and ported many of our activities to these webpages.

Victor Leisnock Santos (Research Assistant, 2022-2023. Based in the School of Psychology and Neuroscience, with Dr Paula Miles). Victor is analysing qualitative and quantitative data that has been gathered to study the impact of our Plates for Education teacher professional development on teachers.

Wing Pun (BSc research student 2023-2024). Wing developed classroom resources for the Scottish secondary Physics curriculum, based on SDSS data. Wing focused on the Hubble’s law.

Brandon Man (BSc research student 2023-2024). Brandon developed classroom resources for the Scottish secondary Physics curriculum, based on SDSS data. Brandon focused on galaxy morphology.

Katie Lee (BSc research student, School of Psychology and Neuroscience, with Paula; 2021-2022). Katie investigated the impact of our Plates for Education teacher professional development on teacher self-efficacy, belonging and identity.

Isobel Salmon Smith (BSc research student 2021-2022). Izzy consulted with teachers to understand barriers to using SDSS Voyages in Physics classrooms in Scotland.

Tini Gabashvili and Chloe Fielding (Undergraduate summer research students, School of Psychology and Neuroscience, with Dr Paula Miles; 2021). Tini and Chloe worked together to conduct a literature review on the impact of professional learning on STEM teacher’s identify, wellbeing, belonging and self-efficacy.

Charlotte Thackeray (Undergraduate summer research student; 2021). Charlotte developed undergraduate-level Jupyter Python notebooks to facilitate the use of MaNGA data in the classroom.

Matt Steel (BSc research student 2020-2021). Matt developed a set of hands-on classroom activities around stellar evolution, using SDSS data and Voyages, aimed at Advanced Higher Physics in the Scottish Curriculum for Excellence.

Lucy Houston (BSc research student 2019-2020). Lucy developed a set of classroom activities to help explain big data and visualisation concepts using SDSS data, aimed at S3-S4 level Computing in the Scottish Curriculum for Excellence.

Isla Mary Rose Barnard (PhD intern 2019-2020). Isla developed an introductory set of lessons for SDSS and played a key role in organising the project in its early days.

Oriel Marshall (MPhys research student 2018-2019 and Summer Research Assistant 2019). Oriel developed a set of hands-on classroom activities to help demonstrate the difference between cosmological redshift and Doppler shift. Oriel played a key role at the start of the project, and organised our very first session at the Dundee Science Centre in 2019.