Connecting classrooms to the Milky Way

'Connecting Classrooms to the Milky Way' is a project of the EU-HOU Consortium (Hands-On-Universe, Europe), involving 11 European countries. It is supported by the lifelong Learning Programme of the European Community. The main goal of this project was to set up the first network of small radio-telescopes dedicated to education all around Europe and directly accessible from a simple Web interface. Any classroom connected to Internet via any Web-browser can now remotely control one of the radio-telescopes and observe the HI emission coming from our Galaxy. The interface also provides the users with simple tools to analyse the data: (i) derive the Milky-Way rotation curve and (ii) map the spiral arms HI distribution. A special emphasis has been made to enable the young generation to understand the challenges of these wavelengths, which are currently at the frontline of the new instruments with the development of the ALMA (Atacama Large Millimeter Array) and SKA (Square Kilometer Array) projects.