# Astronomy summer camp "Beli Brezi", Bulgaria - building the astronomical community of the future

## TL;DR

The paper discusses the long-term impact of the 'Beli Brezi' astronomy camp in Bulgaria, emphasizing its role in fostering critical thinking and community building among high school students over nearly fifty years.

## Contribution

It provides a historical overview and insights into how the camp has evolved to promote critical thinking and community engagement in astronomy education.

## Key findings

- The camp has successfully cultivated critical thinking among students.
- It has contributed to building a future astronomical community.
- The camp's approach extends beyond knowledge dissemination to community and skill development.

## Abstract

Why study astronomy, why teach astronomy? We give answers to these fundamental questions based on our experience with the Astronomical Camp "Beli Brezi" (White Aspens; Kardzhali, Bulgaria). It has been a place for teaching astronomy to high schools kids for nearly half a century. We describe shortly the history of the camp and draw some conclusions based on nearly five decades of experience. Major among them is that the camp has gone further than just distributing astronomical knowledge - while this is an important and worthy task, the main achievement has been the cultivation of critical thinking among the pupils and we think that that is the main motivation to give positively reassuring answers the questions we asked at the beginning.