Computer Science – Multimedia
Scientific paper
Dec 2006
adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2006aas...20917009p&link_type=abstract
2007 AAS/AAPT Joint Meeting, American Astronomical Society Meeting 209, #170.09; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society,
Computer Science
Multimedia
Scientific paper
We present a preview of a new, fully on-line astronomy course for undergraduate non-science majors at Penn State, to be offered for the first time in Spring 2007, with an expected enrollment of 300-600 students. The entire course content is conveyed through an interactive story, capitalizing on the many multimedia astronomy resources publically available on the WWW. The four units of the course, basic astronomy and the nighttime sky, our solar system, stars and the Milky Way Galaxy, and extragalactic astronomy and cosmology deliver the same content as a traditional Astro 001 course. The story for our first unit involves a student abducted by aliens and taken to another planet. There the student is confronted with puzzles involving a different stellar system configuration. The final unit involves a student's quest for a career, aided by visits to alien civilizations in which they explain their varied views of life which is shaped by cosmological findings. The four units are united by a character, the Riddler, who poses riddles about various aspects of the course, and whose identity and purpose is revealed gradually as a reward for completion of various subtopics. This initial offering of the course will be entirely web-based except for traditional evening in-class exams. Our own exams and a standardized preand post-assessment will be used to benchmark our students' performance against those from our traditional course.
We gratefully acknowledge funding from an STScI IDEAS award.
Charlton Jane C.
Herrmann Kimberly A.
Narayanan Anand
Palma Christopher
Tr'Ehnl N.
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