Projects
Opportunities for student activities include projects for beginning students such as following the Moon at night in one hemisphere from a daytime class on the other side of Earth, projects to use thoughtful analysis such measuring the mass of Jupiter from the motions of its satellites, and projects that challenge our perceptions of space and time such as determining distances across our Milky Way and to nearby galaxies from the properties of stars. We are developing a scaffold to enable students and their teachers to progress from carefully structured exercises to a more open individual research projects. The structure allows students to find a level at which they can work and learn, and it can be adapted to a college preparation curriculum in middle and high schools, science fair research, elementary university classes, and advanced preparation for research by physics and astronomy majors.
We outline possible projects that would be components of the scaffold in this document: