7 to 9 of October

The festival will be held throughout the Wairarapa including in Carterton, at Star Safari between Martinborough and Carterton.

There is a variety of accommodation options in the Wairarapa from Solway Copthorne in Masterton through to the many AirBnBs in the region. For the festival we will aim to get a block booking at one or two locations either in Masterton or one of the other Wairarapa towns.

The Festival of Space will be held both indoors and outdoors. The Star Safari site is on a hill and our sessions there will be based around stargazing. As it’s outside and elevated it is exposed to the elements so please bring warm clothing similar to what you would bring if you were to go hiking at night – so hat, gloves, good jacket and versatile footwear. For the indoor sessions we will be in our portable planetarium and in a hall environment.

The Festival of Space is a focused PLD event where we cover different aspects of space education. The aim being to give you the opportunity to interact with space scientists and pick up tools and techniques that can be translated into activities in the classroom and in your schools. We are planning on having a couple of international guest speakers joining us virtually covering topics such as the Mars missions and asteroids.

Your attendance and accommodation at the Festival of Space is covered by your school’s PLD hours. This works out to be 8 hours for the first staff member from your school then 4 hours for subsequent staff.

No, we will cover everything you need to know to be able to confidently cover space science topics for your students, even if you don’t have a science teaching background.

For teachers with a science teaching background then this is the opportunity to extend your expertise through contact with subject matter experts in space. Specifically you’ll be able to interact with our PLD facilitators with expertise in a range of space topics as well with our visiting speakers. This is a great opportunity for you to explore deeper topics and gain ideas on how these can be covered in the classroom.

Depending on the numbers we have a couple of vans that we will use for transport to and from different venues around the Wairarapa.

There are trains that run periodically through to Masterton from Wellington. During week days these are quite frequent and service people commuting to and from Wellignton. During the weekend they are less frequent and often replaced by buses. There are buses services to and from Masterton as well.