Astronomy and Astrophysics – Astronomy
Scientific paper
Dec 1992
adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=1992aas...181.3101d&link_type=abstract
American Astronomical Society, 181st AAS Meeting, #31.01; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, Vol. 24, p.1168
Astronomy and Astrophysics
Astronomy
Scientific paper
For the last eight years we have been developing "The Indoor Telescope," a computer simulation of astronomical research, for use in the introductory astronomy course. With this program students observe a simulated "universe" of 1000 stars using simulated research instrumentation. This instrumentation includes a camera, a Cassegrain spectrograph, an objective prism spectrograph, and an Automatic Photoelectric Telescope. Each student's unique "universe" is based roughly on the general luminosity function and includes interstellar reddening. The goal is for the student to determine as much as possible about as many stars as possible in the "universe." Typical information includes proper motion, variable nature, spectral class, distance, and absolute magnitude. The student's report their conclusions to the program. This compares these conclusions with the information describing the "universe" and awards the student a score on the basis of the accuracy of their results. This simulation was developed for Apple II computers and has been used with nearly 1000 students. We have found that the limitations of the Apple II computer imposed severe constraints on both the design of the simulation and ability to widely distribute it. Last year we replaced our Apple II lab with a Macintosh lab. Therefore, we have recently begun translating the simulation to the Macintosh. We hope that this version will be more portable. In this presentation we will discuss the details of the simulation as well as some conclusions we have drawn about the process of non-science students interacting with simulations based on our experiences. This work is funded by NSF grants SPE-8263018 and USE-9156184.
Dukes Robert J. Jr.
Johnson Rachel A.
Kubinec William R.
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