ИСТИНА

Here we present the idea, structure and content of a new interactive astronomy course developed for Moscow high school students and their teachers. The course is consists of 35 lessons uploaded to the Moscow Electronic School -- an online educational platform which is supposed to become a new standard for Moscow state schools. All scenarios for the lessons were prepared by professional scientists (astronomers, geophysicists, space engineers etc.) and educators recruited around the world. The main goal of the course is to present a contemporary view of the Universe and the basics of the method of scientific research. Also, students will be provided by direct speech from today’s astronomers and learn about connections between the science and various parts of everyday life. Each lesson of the course contains a number of more or less independent and updatable components: a review of up-to-date astronomical news (supported by Russian scientific media), one unique animated podcast, a set of interactive exercises, a commentary from an expert, homework tasks and supplementary materials. Thus, each lesson, in fact, is a construction kit providing a teacher with the educational stuff for his/her astronomical classes. At the same time, each lesson can also be used autonomously without a teacher at all. The latter is particularly important since Moscow state educational system suffers from the lack of qualified teachers of astronomy. Thus, we believe that adopted “construction kit” approach can be widely used within the worldwide astronomical education.