Physics 55: Educational Links

Applets

1. Sky View Cafe, free Java-based digital planetarium.

2. Binary star orbits.
3. U. of Oregon Astrophysics applets.

Approaches:

• Astronomy ConcepTests and the Astronomy Diagnostic Test.
• Collaborative Learning: Small Group Learning Page.
• Just-in-Time Teaching.
• Project Galileo: peer instruction and other educational innovations.
• Resource Letter AER-1 on Astronomy education research, American Journal of Physics article.
• Blog software and sites:
  • Bloglines
  • Movable Type.
  • UserLand's Radio.
  • WordPress
• Hardware:
  • Smarttech Sympodium interactive display hardware.
  • Transmitters for interactive teaching:
    • EduCue, distributor for PRS.
    • HITT: Hyper-Interactive Teaching Technology.
    • PRS classrooms at Duke.

Courses and Textbooks.

General Interest Books.

Multimedia:

• Astronomy Picture of the Day.
• Black holes and neutron stars: virtual trips.
• Cool Cosmos, interactive educational website about applications of infrared imaging on Earth and to astronomy.
• HubbleSite: pictures from the Hubble Space Telescope.
• The Nine Planets, a multimedia tour of the solar system.
• A Private Universe, 20-minute online video from the Annenberg/CPB site about how difficult it is for students to overcome their personal models of how things work. The video interviews Harvard and high school students who have mistaken ideas about why the seasons occur or why the moon has phases.
• A Question of Scale: a pictorial tour from tiny quarks to the giant universe in steps of a factor of 10. The tour starts here and you can descend in scale by clicking the "-1" button near the top right of the web page.
• Runaway Universe: multimedia presentation about the universe by NOVA.
• Seeing Relativity, visualizations of what the world would look like if the speed of light were much slower, just a few meters per second.
• Slacker Astronomy, podcasts.
• Spacesounds, various sounds of the solar system, pulsars, and the Big Bang translated into the human range of audition.

Projects:

• Building your own cross-staff.
• Cloud chamber (homemade apparatus for observing cosmic rays and products of their collisions).
• CLEA: Contemporary Laboratory Experiences in Astronomy.
• Distributed computing astronomy projects:
  • SETI@home, help the search for extraterrestrial intelligence signals.
  • StarDust, download PC microscope program to help scientists look for interstellar dust.
• Hands on Universe
• Interactive Lesson Guide for Astronomy: Cooperative Learning Activities by Michael Zeilik.
• Las Cumbras Observatory Global Telescope Network, robotic telescopes on the Internet for research and education.
• Weighing a star.

Software:

• Celestia, free 3D space simulator.
• Google Sky.
• Orbit Explorer, simulate orbits of planets, moon in solar system.
• Planetarium software.
• RedShift.
• SkyGazer and Voyager III programs by Carina Software.
• Solar System Simulator of NASA.
• StarClock: PC software to visualize stellar evolution.
• Starry Night.
• Your Sky: web-based planetarium software.