Encyclopedia Galactica's assessment of Earth (which is not important
enough to merit a longer entry). This made me think that looking at
the solar system through alien's eyes might help students learn about
it. I conducted Science in the River City workshop for earth science
teachers based on this idea, and this is a list of resources for such
teachers.
First, I highlighted a graphing activity I had done with elementary
kids; that experienced is described in great detail here. (Feel free
to download and copy the graph.) I extended the activity to graphing the
surface temperatures of the planets as a function of distance from the
Sun, which led to the greenhouse effect discussion below, but now it
occurs to me that a great way to extend this activity would be to jigsaw
it: assign one group of students to graph size vs distance from the Sun,
another to graph temperature vs distance from the Sun, another to graph
density vs distance from the Sun, etc, and then the groups come together
to think about what it all implies for the formation of the solar system.
Second, when discussing the formation of the solar system and
describing how small grains of dust started to stick together, I
wanted to show a video clip but had some technical difficulties. Here
is the link; start at 3 minutes into the video and go for 2.5 minutes.
(If you have time, the whole episode is worth watching. It's from the
How the Earth Was Made series, which has some really nice
visualizations and is constructed around evidence, which is a key
feature missing from many science documentaries. It tells science
like the detective story it is. That's generally a good thing, but in
this case the implication that this particular astronaut doing this
particular demonstration singlehandedly saved the theory is a bit of
an exaggeration.)
Pocket solar system: https://nightsky.jpl.nasa.gov/download-view.cfm?Doc_ID=392
Peppercorn Earth: http://www.noao.edu/education/peppercorn/pcmain.html
Extrasolar planets: http://exoplanets.org/ has the most up-to-date
info. Even better, they have built-in graphing tools so you and
your students can easily explore the data.
Earth's surface temperature: I got my plot from the most authoritative
source for modern temperatures, NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies.
This link only scratches the surface of climate change data because it deals
with modern temperature measurements (as opposed to long-ago temperatures
inferred from ice cores etc) but as the greenhouse effect was not the focus of
the workshop I won't try to compile a list of links here. (For those
not attending the workshop: we graphed planets' surface temperatures
vs distance from the Sun, and we saw the general pattern that farther
from Sun equals colder, but we also saw that Venus is a real outlier
from this pattern. That's because Venus has had a runaway greenhouse
effect. Earth also has a natural greenhouse effect which keeps us
from being frozen, but which is now being augmented by a manmade
greenhouse effect. I did tell the teachers that Earth has a "carbon
cycle" which will absorb the extra carbon dioxide through the oceans
into rocks, but I forgot to mention that it will take hundreds of
thousands of years; I didn't mean to imply that humans can carry on
regardless. Venus' greenhouse effect is "runaway" because its
carbon cycle shut down when its oceans boiled.)
Finally, a few links I didn't get time to show but which will help you
appreciate the size of the universe (and the sizes of things in it):
the classic Powers of Ten video and an interactive tool.
No comments:
Post a Comment