A Sense of Scale

Today we covered three small topics.  It's my last day with the 1-2
graders (I will rotate to the upper graders), and also the last day
before Christmas vacation, so I tried to squeeze in several fun things
and also answer some of the questions which arose last week.  So we
didn't go super-deep in any one topic, but we had a blast. 

We started with a movie: the ten-minute 1977 classic Powers of Ten by
Charles and Ray Eames.  I wanted to show this movie because the kids
had many questions last time, when I mentioned galaxies but didn't
have time to really explain them.  This movie steadily zooms out from
a person on Earth to show how big and how far apart astronomical
objects are.  The movie then zooms progressively in to show the sizes
of microscopic things.  (Note: if you want more snazzy modern special
effects you might try the more recent Cosmic Voyage, but Powers of Ten
feels more intense.)  I stopped the movie many times to answer
questions as they arose, but eventually there were too many questions.
We had four 3-4 graders in the room, and I will be doing astronomy
with them in the spring.  It looks like showing this movie would be a
good way to start my three months with them.  They could generate
questions, and we could take our time answering them.  The best
question today was, "How do we know all this?" and I hated not having
time to give a real answer.  My three months of astronomy with the 3-4
graders will be the answer to "How do we know all this?"

I then showed a website for visualizing the sizes of things, where you
control the zoom. This is a great site for showing how much
bigger the Sun is compared to Earth, how much bigger some stars are
compared to the Sun, etc.  But be warned: they do NOT show the space between these objects, so don't be fooled.  The space in between stars
is VERY, VERY BIG compared to the stars themselves. 
Apart from that, it's a great tool.  (One caveat: I did not zoom out all the way to the "estimated size of the universe"...there is no estimated size of the universe.)  Exploring this site also generated many questions, so that may also be a good icebreaking activity.  Because you can zoom in as well, it could even be a good icebreaker for life sciences as well.

A few more links for interested parents:

• http://www.nikon.com/about/feelnikon/universcale/  is a similar idea as the previous link but with a different feel.  It's worth checking out, but it mostly focuses on microscopic things rather than astronomical things (it has a few mistakes too.

• http://www.wordwizz.com/pwrsof10.htm is another site along these lines; it's not as pretty as the previous two, but it does properly show the vast space between things.

• http://www.powersof10.com/ is a site (currently in beta) by the Eames Office. I just discovered while gathering links for this post, so I can't say much about it other than it looks promising.

Activity number two was understanding orbits with a donutapult demo and play with the coin funnel.  Since I've blogged about this before, I won't describe it in detail here.  If you'd like to read about it, search for these terms (donutapult and coin funnel) in this blog's search box.

Activity number three will be the next blog post.