All of the lab activities below were developed by me for my integrated lecture/lab course at Pima Community College. They appear in order of refinement, from those that I’ve implemented and refined 5+ times to those that have only been implemented in the classroom once.
They are all designed to be completed at minimal expense to the instructor and/or institution, and are therefore especially well suited to community college and high school classrooms. Please contact me if you’d like editable versions.
Description: Utilizes an Allstate Insurance Company tongue-in-cheek press release about accident statistics by zodiacal sign to get students thinking about the nature of science, scientific evidence and the difference between Astronomy and Astrology.
Quantitative Skills Addressed: Table Reading and Construction, Graph Reading, Proportional Reasoning
Description: Students work with a time series of images of the Moons of Jupiter to develop an understanding of orbital motion and celestial mechanics. They use their measurements to calculate the orbital periods of the moons, use the size of Jupiter in the images to calculate the semimajor axis of each orbit, and then apply Newton’s version of Kepler’s Third Law to calculate the mass of Jupiter.
Quantitatitve Skills: Making Measurements and Graphs, Graph Reading and Interpretation, Interpolation, Error and Uncertainty
Galaxy Song Lab
Description: Students break down the text of Monty Python’s Galaxy Song to develop a sense of the scale of the Milky Way and the morphology of spiral galaxies. I usually use this as the first lab in a Galaxies and Cosmology unit.
Quantitative Skills: Unit Conversions, Proportional Reasoning
Celestial Motions Lab
Solar Neighborhood Lab
Solar System Size and Scale Lab