Prehistory and Archaeology workshop for primary and secondary teachers


On Thursday 11 March 2021, our member Dr Sofía Samper Carro presented her first Prehistory/Archaeology Workshop for over 30 ACT primary and secondary teachers.

Dr Carro’s workshop included many fun, hands-on learning activities, and the first two topics dealt with Chronology and Stratigraphy.

Working in small groups, participants embraced challenges such as working out the chronology of key steps in human story; interpreting an image showing stratification; and sequencing hominid skulls.

The feedback from participants was uniformly enthusiastic. Sofia’s model is ‘teach the teacher’, with an aim of building up teachers’ and students’ skills through rich teaching materials and replica artefacts directly relating to the ACT primary and secondary curricula.

The workshop was held in collaboration with the ACT History Teachers’ Association and Canberra Archaeology Society, and under the auspices of the ARC-funded Centre of Excellence for Australian Biodiversity and Heritage.

The second workshop will be run on the 27 May 2021, focused on contextual data and archaeological artefacts.


Angel.Lopez-Sanchez

About Angel.Lopez-Sanchez

A/Prof Ángel R. López-Sánchez is an astrophysicist and science communicator working at the School of Mathematical and Physical Sciences, Macquarie University (MQ). He is a recognised expert in the study of how the gas is converted into stars in galaxies and how this affects galaxy evolution. He graduated in Theoretical Physics at the University of Granada (2000) and completed his PhD Thesis in Astrophysics at the prestigious “Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias” (IAC, Spain) and the University of La Laguna (Spain) in 2006. He moved to Australia in 2007, joining CSIRO “Astronomy and Space Science” to perform radio-interferometric observations of gas-rich galaxies at the Australian Telescope Compact Array. In 2011 he joined the Australian Astronomical Observatory and Macquarie University combining instrumentation support, research, lecturing, and outreach. He was appointed as a full-time research academic at the School of Mathematical and Physical Sciences at Macquarie University in May 2023. He is the president of the association of Spanish Researchers in Australia-Pacific (SRAP), the vice-president of the Astronomical Association of Córdoba (AAC, Spain), representative in the Andalusian Astronomy Network (RAdA), and member of the International Astronomical Union (IAU), the Spanish Astronomy Society (SEA), and the Australian Astronomy Society (ASA). He is a globally-recognised science communicator, with visibility in Spanish and Australian printed, broadcast, and social media. He is also a passionate amateur astronomer that uses his own equipment for capturing the beauty of the Cosmos. His stunning astronomy time-lapse videos and photos have received +1/2 million views in YouTube and have been seen in TV channels in USA, Australia and Spain, science museums worldwide, and textbooks.