Skynet Junior Scholars: Bringing Astronomy to Deaf and Hard of Hearing Youth

SkynetJunior Scholars (SJS), funded by the National Science Foundation, aims to engage middle school youth from diverse audiences in investigating the universe with research quality robotic telescopes. SJS project development goals include: 1) Online access to optical and radio telescopes, data analysis tools, and professional astronomers, 2) An age-appropriateweb-based interface for controlling remote telescopes, 3) Inquiry-based standards-aligned instructional modules. From an accessibility perspective, the goal of the SkynetJunior Scholars project is to facilitate independent access to the project by all youth including those with blindness or low vision and those who are Deaf or Hard of Hearing.Deaf and Hard of Hearing (DHH) students have long been an underserved population within STEM fields, including astronomy. Two main barriers include: (1) insufficient corpus of American Sign Language(ASL) for astronomyterminology, and (2) DHH education professionals who lack astronomybackground. A suite of vocabulary, accessible hands-on activities, and interaction with trained professionals, are critical for enhancing the background experiences of DHH youth, as they may come to an astronomylesson lacking the basic "incidental learning" that is often taken for granted with hearing peers (for example, from astronomyin the media).A collaboration between the SkynetJunior Scholars (SJS) project and the Wisconsin School for the Deaf is bringing astronomyto the DHH community in an accessible way for the first time. We follow a group of seven DHH youth over one semester as they interact with the SJS tools and curriculum to understand how they assimilate astronomyexperiences and benefit from access to telescopesboth directly (on school campus and at Yerkes Observatory) and through Skynet's robotic telescopenetwork (optical and radio telescopes, inquiry-based modules, data analysis tools, and professional astronomers). We report on our first findings of resources and best practices for engaging DHH youth in astronomyin the future.