My 12th grade Physical Science class has been restructured. Basically, about half of my students had Physical Science in 9th grade at other schools and they all had Chemistry last year. While it’s still Physical Science, we are spending a great deal of time on astronomy and the basic physics they need to understand the universe. The kids are very excited about their astronomy course, as am I. I am thinking about showing them the entire series of “From the Earth to the Moon.” It’s long, real long. There are 12, one-hour episodes. I also plan on showing them Apollo 13. I’m just not sure I want to show twelve days of shows, but I don’t think there are any episodes I would leave out. Showing one, or even two a week will take too long, we’ll be done astronomy before I finish. So I’m looking for the opinions of other teachers. What do you think? What would you do?
November 20, 2008
June 22, 2008
Astronomy Project
This year I wanted to include a unit on astronomy in my Physics classes. Rather than teach the material myself, I felt this was worth having the students do as a project. I broke the material into the following areas:
- The Earth
- The Sun & other stars
- Space Travel & Space Ships
- The Big Bang & Cosmic Evolution
- Inner Planets
- Mars
- Jupiter
- Saturn
- Outer Bodies (Uranus, Neptune, Pluto, Kuiper Belt, Oort Cloud)
- Telescopes
- The Night Sky
- Exosolar Planets & SETI
The order above is the order I wanted the material presented. While that didn’t work out because students were absent or unprepared, I developed the order so that the subject built on previous presentations. I will definitely keep it the order listed for next year.
Each group or individual had to do a Powerpoint presentation with at least 20 slides. I then gave them a presentation called “How to do a lousy powerpoint” where I did many things wrong to illustrate what NOT to do. It got a good laugh. I told them I wanted well researched information and lots of visuals, including movie files and simulations. To start them on the research path, I provided this page of links: recommended-astronomy-web-links
I had specific areas I wanted the students to include, so I helped them along by providing a sheet with suggested topics. Here is the word document: astronomy-outline-2
The handout is broken into the topic and suggestions specific to that topic. There isn’t a sheet for SETI because a couple of students asked to add it. They did a great job describing the different methods used to detect exosolar planets. The simulation below is a demonstration of the wobble method used to detect planets outside of our solar system.
Students also had to provide a study guide for taking notes during the presentation and a quiz to be given the next day. I ran into problems with trying to fit two presentations and two quizzes into each class period. In the end, I randomly gave quizzes and they were allowed to use their study guides (as was the plan). I need to do something better here. I may up the requirements to 30 slides, then only have one presentation per class period. That would work out better for the quizzes.
No project of mine would be complete without the rubric: Astronomy rubric
Please add to this project by providing your comments.
