The JWST Advanced Deep Extragalactic Survey (JADES) collaboration has members at several sites in North America as well as in the U.K. and many European countries. The collaboration has no funding for outreach, but collaboration members realized that a tool developed to assist in the collaboration’s work, “FITSMap” (https://jades.idies.jhu.edu), could afford the public a way to look at the team’s high redshift imagery. Having the audience snap a QR code presented in a talk which then lets them examine galaxies on their phones has been quite popular (although care is needed to ensure that the presentation venue has adequate internet access). The JADES web page at https://jades-survey.github.io/ also has a link to a video explaining in more detail how to use the viewer. An important outcome of this type of outreach is that the public can begin to see that science is not cut and dried or yes or no with a real data set presenting a large variety of behaviors to be understood.
The notion of using real research imagery has been expanded to include activities for K-12 students. The activities use data from JADES to explore several concepts such as distance and spectroscopy. Each activity includes a teacher’s guide which outlines the goals of the exercise, and which provides the teacher with further discussion topics. The goals of the activities include developing critical thinking, pattern recognition, working in groups, and writing for exercises aimed at younger students with older students challenged to develop analytical and research skills. The guides include a section on how the activities relate to science education goals in both the U.S. and the U.K.
The collaboration has also begun creating videos available at https://www.youtube.com/@jades-survey to highlight some of the team, and to illustrate the more personal side of research. We hope to expand this set of videos with more recordings in the future.