Astronomy and Astrophysics – Astronomy
Scientific paper
Dec 2010
adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2010agufmed23a0711u&link_type=abstract
American Geophysical Union, Fall Meeting 2010, abstract #ED23A-0711
Astronomy and Astrophysics
Astronomy
[0805] Education / Elementary And Secondary Education, [0815] Education / Informal Education, [0830] Education / Teacher Training
Scientific paper
Where does space begin? How far is the Moon? How far is Mars? How does our dynamic star, the Sun, affect its family of planets? All of these questions relate to exploration of our Solar System, and are also part of the Education/Public Outreach (E/PO) Program for NASA’s CINDI project, a space weather mission of opportunity. The Coupled Ion Neutral Dynamics Investigation has been flying aboard the US Air Force Communication/Navigation Outage Forecast System (C/NOFS) satellite in the upper atmosphere of the Earth since April 2008. The Earth’s ionosphere, the part of the atmosphere CINDI studies, is also in space. The CINDI E/PO program uses this fact in lessons designed to help students in middle schools and introductory astronomy classes develop a sense of their place in space. In the activity "How High is Space?" students’ start by building an 8-page scale model of the Earth’s atmosphere with 100 km/page. The peak of Mount Everest, commercial airplanes, and the tops of thunderheads all appear at the bottom of the first page of the model, with astronaut altitude -where space begins- at the top of the same sheet of paper. In "Where Would CINDI Be?" the idea of scale is further developed by modeling the Earth-Moon system to scale first in size, then in distance, using half of standard containers of play dough. With a lowest altitude of about 400 km, similar to that of the International Space Station and orbiting Space Shuttle, CINDI is close to the Earth when compared with the nearly thousand times greater distance to the Moon. Comparing and combining the atmosphere and Earth-Moon system models help reinforce ideas of scale and build student understanding of how far away the Moon actually is. These scale models have also been adapted for use in Family Science Nights, and to include the planet Mars. In this presentation, we will show how we use CINDI’s scale modeling activities and others from our broader space sciences E/PO program in formal and informal settings. We will also show how their use as embedded assessments in classroom instruction to identify and address naïve conceptions of scale in the Solar System. For the International Year of the Solar System, we are sharing these resources with teachers through several teacher professional development programs at The University of Texas at Dallas and at area and state science teacher conferences. All CINDI E/PO materials including our popular "Cindi in Space" comic book, the new "Cindi in the Electric Atmosphere" comic book for high school, and our resource on "How Big is a Million?" are all available for free downloads from our website or on CD.
Hairston Marc R.
Urquhart Mary L.
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