The parallel Globe and the Globo Local Project

Astronomy is a motivating and intriguing topic that can provide a meaningful way to introduce basic physics ideas about motion and light. Educational research, however, shows that traditional ways of presenting it in formal as well as in informal contexts leave, or even create misunderstanding of basic ideas. In this paper, we discuss how to overcome the difficulty of joining local observations with the outdoor vision of the Earth rotating around a “tilted” axis with the North “up” and the South “down”, represented by common commercial globes. We present the Parallel Globe, the model/tool we designed to help people understand their position on the Earth in relation to other locations on the planet. Additionally, we created the Globo Local Project in which we promoted observing the Parallel Globe at different latitudes and longitudes during the Equinoxes and Solstices 2011. Some conclusions and a possible evolution of the project are presented in terms of the opportunity to disseminate an innovative way of teaching astronomy and the effectiveness of the Parallel Globe in understanding the Earth’s Seasons