The Classroom Astronomer Newsletter #15Lite - December 16, 2021
Sky Lesson--New Year's Ecliptic Pachinko; Smartphone Simulations; Massive Resource Collections; TCALite Goes to Monthly Digest--TCA goes to 30 issues, Get it for 45% off!
Cover Photo - Smartphone Universes
In This Issue:
(Italics means Full Subscribers only)
Cover Photo - Smartphone Universes
Welcome to Issue 15, the Last Issue of 2021!
TCALite goes to a monthly digest, TCA to 30 Issues per year
Subscribe to TCA with the reduced price “30 for $30” plan!Sky Lessons - Ecliptic Pachinko
Astronomical Teachniques -
Smartphone Astronomy Simulations
The Inverse Square Smartphone
ASP Notes—What Kids Think Are Scientific Activities; Learn by TeachingConnection to the Sky -
Massively Resourceful Collections
All the Moon’s MotionsThe RAP Sheet – Research Abstracts for Practitioners -
- Why and how teachers make use of drawing activities in early childhood science education
- Deciding on drawing: the topic matters when using drawing as a science learning strategyThe Galactic Times Inbox Magazine #15 Highlights
LAST CHANCE!!! The Hermograph End of Year/Holidays 50% Off Sale
Welcome to the last 2021 issue of The Classroom Astronomer Inbox Magazine!
Holiday Hiatus….
Starting January 1st, the Full Edition of The Classroom Astronomer (TCA) goes from 24 issues per year to 30! And we’re taking the New Year’s off so our FIRST TCA of 2022 will be out on January 10th.
The first TCALite of 2022, which will become a monthly digest, will be published on January 31st.
Upgrade to the Full TCA Edition with a “30 Issues for $30” plan through January 15, 2021, through THIS LINK ==>
You will get 25% more Full issues (30, not 24), and 2.5X more issues than Lite issues (30 versus 12) for 45% off!
- - -
Visit the revamped (and much more pretty!) homepage for The Classroom Astronomer with its index to all (now) 15 Inbox Magazine issues’ contents by celestial object and educational subject area, and Tables of Contents. Also, each article or Teachnique is coded with grade level or venue. P for Primary grades, C for College/University, and so on. Come explore! http://www.classroomastronomer.com .
Subscription site, and archive for full subscribers only:
Have a Happy Holiday, whatever Holiday makes you Happy! (We hope to have a Super Saturnalia, but that’s just us…)
Publisher -- Dr. Larry Krumenaker
Sky Lessons - Ecliptic Pachinko
Almost like some cosmic pachinko game, New Year’s Day is the midpoint for a reshuffling of the planetary pinballs. Order into chaos, or at least, a new order, eventually.
We start out with four of the five naked-eye worlds all lined up in the Western sky, all but Mars, and all but perfect on the 22nd. Mercury is below and right of Venus, brilliant but low and lowering in the WSW, Saturn dim above and left of Venus, and Jupiter in the clear further beyond Saturn. All are delineating the ecliptic, at least to within a tiny handful of degrees.
Then the unraveling begins.
On the 29th, Mercury gains altitude, passing four degrees to the left of Venus, dropping downwards. On the 31st, in the dawn, find the Moon doing a drop down onto Mars, literally if you are in Asia or Oceania.
Starting off 2022 find the Moon passing Mercury, Saturn and Jupiter in the evening, on the 3rd, 4th, and 5th, respectively. Yes, it passed Venus too, but both were too close to the Sun.
Saturn begins its farewell, passing Mercury on the 12th. By month’s end, out of four worlds we started with, there will only be Jupiter left. Three will be crowding the morning twilight. The pachinko will have ended.
Astronomical Teachniques
* Smartphone Astronomy Simulations (Cover Story)
Kevin Lee has a love-hate with Smartphones and teaching. Like all teachers he really doesn’t like to see students staring at screens more than at the front of the classroom. Or at lab equipment. On the other hand, he has come to the point of ‘if you can’t shut ‘em down, make phones useful’. It seems almost pointless to resist using smartphones now.
The University of Nebraska-Lincoln astronomy educator has been a long time creator of simulations since back when the earliest Web browsers could be made to do the first scripts and Flash. At the recent 2021 Astronomy Society of the Pacific (ASP) virtual conference he gave both a presentation and a workshop on using Smartphones not only for astronomy simulations but IN astronomy classrooms.
The Research Why
Virtually all Americans (presumably, adults and most teens) have cell phones, though not necessarily smart phones, according to 2021 research by Pew. An article from 8 years ago indicated that virtually 100% of all college students had not just cell phones but smartphones. The less than 1% who didn’t (and those are hard to find) can use old “retired” phones on loan or laptops or tablets for replacements. With 3G essentially being phased out this year, these retired phones can still be used on wi-fi connections as low-end computers for educational purposes.
And, as any parent of a teen or college student knows, these young humans are emotionally attached to their screen device, an incentive for finding an educational use. Unfortunately, they are also prominent in their use for entertainment—chatting, social media, email, shopping, videos, games, etc. Academic honesty issues still abound. Lee (and others) point out that rules have to be given still to the students in the class about this. He also says about half of all faculty he knows ban smartphones from class.
“Playing on the phones is detrimental” he writes. “Humans don’t multitask (well).” There is ample research on the negative impacts on performance (grades), and as distractions to neighbors in class. Lee tries through appeals to take the high road but believes there does have to be consequences for violations, at least after some level or point, though he didn’t say what.
Lee in 2021 began attempting three uses of smartphones in his classes. He has tried using them for ranking tasks—where you take a number of items and put them in some order, such as increasing distance, size, or along some function or parameter—for peer instruction, like voting for ABCD choices, and for a few simulations.
Early Work
Lee demonstrated some early work in sims and ranking tasks. In all cases, he says students get their instructions through a single slide flashed up on the screen at the front of the class room. A blank slide is below:
Both the QR code, easy to make with various codemakers on the Internet, and the URL are provided for students to get to the simulation via smartphone, laptop or tablet, whatever the student has. Smartphones have a better tendency, it is claimed, to adjust the size of the images and locations of displayed texts and buttons, than perhaps the other devices. In Lee’s usage, these come after a lesson on a particular topic and are used often for followup or more detailed study, review and self-assessment after the introduction of the topic.
As an example, Planetary Positions Simulator (see Cover Photo) takes the positions of the planets in the Solar System and relates them to how an observer would see them on Earth, day or night, in the altitude-azimuth system. One can make measures, change parameters and viewpoints, and gather information to answer questions.
Here are three simulations he made available, the Planetary Positions one plus an Eclipse Explorer, and one on Star Trails.
The simpler educational activity is the Ranking Task. On a smartphone, that involves merely dragging images around until they are in the order desired. Here are three such tasks, planets in order of distance from Earth, objects in order of distance from Earth, and increasing orbital eccentricity:
Some more advanced simulations included exoplanetary orbit sizes, and HR diagram luminosity scaling.
Not everyone may have a laptop in a classroom situation, or in a home in underserved populations. But smartphones may be a way to begin to bridge any gaps in resource materials in astronomy to students who seem sometimes more married to their phones than to their studies.
A wide variety of simulation links are found off the Nebraska-Lincoln astronomy department homepage, at http://astro.unl.edu.
* The Inverse Square Smartphone
* ASP Notes
< The above two articles available for Full Subscribers only>
More ASP stories next issue!
Connections to the Sky
* Massively Resourceful Collections
Perhaps you have heard of the abbreviation MOOC. That’s a Massively Open Online Course. Thursday at the ASP meeting could have been listed as the Massively On Display Online Collection of Resources Day. Several people gave reviews of theirs, or others’, collections of resources for online or in-person classes…labs…homeworks…educational activities, or assessments for afterwards. The amount of material out there is staggering. To write it all here would be a book. In fact, some of them are in books. But many of the materials in those books are available online.
What I will do here now is simply list the highlights and URLs of the major collections here. I have left out smaller sites. What I intend to do later is pick topics — stellar evolution, giant planets, galactic structure, whatever — and go through each one of the resources and describe what is available, as educational tool, as lab, as assessment, and put them into future TCAs, and on the TCA homepage at www.classroomastronomer.com . -LK
Center for Astronomy Education as.arizona.edu/cae/materials_resources
Assessments and Think-Pair-Share questions, Ranking Tasks on:
Night Sky, Fundamentals, Nature of Light, Stars and Galaxies and Beyond, Solar System, Exoplanets (unit with powerpoints).
Ranking Tasks on Magnitudes, Luminosities, Stellar Evolution, Doppler Shift, Gravity, Size and Scale, Seasons, Moon Phases, Kepler’s Laws, Sky Motions.
Lecture Powerpoints, Exam Banks, Additional Resources.AstronomyCenter.org https://www.compadre.org/astronomy/
A resource from the NSF and AAPT, it collect websites concerning pedagogy, student labs, simulations, projects and images in astronomy for teachers. It is broken down into 14 broad categories: astronomy education, cosmology, fundamentals, historical, exploration, Milky Way, Sun, Solar System, stars, exoplanets, galaxies, time and distance, instrumentation.Andrew Fraknoi’s Resource Guides https://www.fraknoi.com/resource-guides-on-astronomy-education/
Twelve very pointed resources, such as debunking pseudoscience, black and women astronomers, and such. Of particular interest here is the two PDF-pages list of college and high-school online-lab exercises.University of Nebraska-Lincoln Apps and Simulations http://astro.unl.edu
As discussed in the article above, there are loads of simulations of all sorts of astronomical phenomena here, in HTML5 and for use in everything from desktop computer browsers to smartphones.Foothill College’s AstroSims https://foothill.edu/astronomy/astrosims.html
This college site contains a fair number of web browser astronomy simulations, many of which are more in physics areas, such as light and spectra and stars, but also in such historically interesting topics as ancient Ptolemaic and Copernican planetary theories and modern gravitational lensings, and some astrobiology. Not many sims, but what it lacks in numbers it makes up in having a directory of many other simulation websites!
[With thanks for direct contributions to the above from Chris Impey, Ed Prather, and Andy Fraknoi. -LK]
* All The Moon’s Motions
The RAP Sheet – Research Abstracts for Practitioners
What’s in the scholarly astronomy education journals you can use NOW.
In olden days, like the 17th to 19th centuries, all good scientists drew in their journals. A lost art. Couldn’t drawing be a way of learning even in these high tech times? These two articles explore drawing-for-learning.
<The above Moon article and the RAP Sheet column are available only to Full Subscribers>
In Issue 15 of The Galactic Times Inbox Magazine:
Cover Photo — Finding b Centauri
This Just In —
Have a Corona, NASA!
Speaking of Coronal Activities…
Earth’s Weight Gain
b Centauri, the Unusual Planetary System (Cover Story)Sky Planning Calendar —
* Moon-Gazing - A Brief Four-Planet Line-Up in the Evening;
* Observing—Plan-et — Hello, Mercury, Farewell, Venus; And When IS the Shortest Day of the Year, Really?
* Border Crossings — Just for three days…* For the Future (January 1-16) — So you don’t go cold turkey….
Astronomy in Everyday Life —Galileo’s House for Sale—Half Price!
Subscribe to it here! It’s Free!
LAST CHANCE!!! The Hermograph End of Year/Holidays 50% Off Sale.
Through December 24th, the discount off any item in the Hermograph Store is:
== 50%, Use Code EOY4. ==
==Astronomy and Education Related Items==
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