Imagine your students working together on an activity that engages them with authentic data, is aligned with topics you already teach, and builds their confidence in doing science, while becoming more data fluent.

Rubin Observatory has developed free, online investigations that use intuitive data visualizations and interactive analysis tools. Investigations are designed to take into account classroom time and technology constraints, and address the reasoning levels and common learning challenges of students. While they can be used asynchronously, a face to face setting is optimal for active-learning and discussion.

These investigations are appropriate for students in advanced middle school through “Astro 101” college courses. They are accessible to students of all backgrounds and abilities. All investigations incorporate the three-dimensional learning design of the NGSS and come with extensive teacher support materials, including formative and summative assessments.

In this talk, I will present a methodical (step by step) spatial curriculum focused on teaching students about the complex astronomy concept of seasons. The curriculum teaches students about seasons using spatial activities to improve their spatial thinking, reasoning, and conceptual understanding of the topic. This spatial curriculum requires minimum material and is easy to implement for middle or high school students. The curriculum was implemented in 6th grade at a STEM school. The 7-lesson plan curriculum includes spatial components like 2D and 3D drawings, videos, and simulations combined with group discussions. Students use digital diaries (Google Slides) as means for journaling and learning about various concepts related to the seasons. The implementation showed that spatial activity improved students’ spatial thinking and reasoning. Students also demonstrated an overall increase in conceptual understandings about seasons and showed more interest in learning new astronomy topics using a similar spatial curriculum.

This presentation will describe the desirable characteristics of HTML5 astronomy simulations targeted at smartphones and show several examples illustrating these characteristics. We will summarize current thinking regarding “best practices” for smartphone simulation usage in the classroom, covering what we have learned from our experiences and detailing a wish list of what we hope to learn in the future. Publicly available simulations will be described as well as possible avenues for building upon the classroom experience with student simulation work outside of the classroom.

We have developed and field tested two new lecture tutorial style activities for college level introductory astronomy students. Both encourage students to think critically about challenges associated with human space travel. In the activity Migration to Mars, students consider what supplies need to be taken on a trip to Mars, dangers posed to the human body while traveling in space, and the costs associated with this type of space travel. Students are challenged to creatively communicate their imagined travels to and from Mars by depicting Instagram posts. In the Solar Sails activity, students compare and contrast different rocket types: ion thrusters, chemical rockets, and solar sails. They also think about the relative fuel efficiency of each type of rocket, destination-specific communication delays, and requirements for extrasolar ships to be unmanned and autonomous. Activities and student reactions to them will be shared in this talk.