Celestia/Eyes Email

I'm working with my mother (librarian/media specialist at Jesse Wharton Elementary) to develop an interactive space curriculum for elementary schoolers during their computer lab time. Some 1st grade students have computer lab time that is currently unused and Momma suggested I could use that time to provide some space education, which they'll be learning about shortly after the winter break. Each class will have one or two 40-minute class periods about this. I'm still in the early stages of thinking about this, and I'd like to get your feedback if you have any.

Given that they are first graders, I'm sure you know how hard it will be for me to not AGB at them. (Heck, it's difficult enough to not go overboard with explanations with adults! "AGB" refers to Asymptotic Giant Branch and is the shorthand in the AST-251 class for going into too much technical detail for a given audience)

I intend to use the software Celestia found at https://celestia.space/ as well as NASA's Eyes on the Solar System found at https://eyes.nasa.gov/ to show them the solar system and the universe in three dimensions.

Celestia: 3D planetarium software. (I prefer Space Engine, but that's too resource-intensive for school PCs) It allows the user to free fly through space, click on objects and go to them, or search for objects and go to them. 1st graders will need to be shown how to operate the controls, because Celestia is not super user-friendly--after having taken a more than ten year break from using it, it's not simple to get back into it. But I was messing around with this program when I was in first grade, so I know it's not too difficult to get the hang of it!

Eyes on the Solar System: More user friendly. Comes in advanced and simple modes, and is more user friendly, at the cost of some aspect of visual realism. It also has pretty much every NASA Spacecraft with their missions updated, so you could follow the Voyager missions for instance from launch to present (and future for that matter). Unfortunately it doesn't seem to do the Apollo mission! What a shame, since that's one of the focuses on the unit.

With both programs the user can alter the rate of time, the date, and fly through the solar system. Eyes provides information on the planets, but the reading level may surpass 1st grade anyway, given that not all first graders can read. An excerpt:

Jupiter is the largest and most massive planet in our solar system, containing more than twice the amount of material of the other bodies orbiting our sun combined. Most of the material left over after the formation of the sun went to Jupiter, forming a type of planet called a gas giant.
Jupiter's appearance is a tapestry of colorful cloud bands and spots. Most visible clouds are composed of ammonia and ammonia compounds, with unknown chemicals providing color. Jupiter's fast rotation - spinning once every 10 hours - creates strong jet streams, smearing its clouds into bands across the planet.
With no solid surface to slow them down, Jupiter's spots can persist for many years. The Great Red Spot, a swirling oval of clouds twice as wide as Earth, has been observed on the giant planet for more than 300 years. More recently, three smaller ovals merged to form the Little Red Spot, about half the size of its larger cousin. Scientists do not yet know if these ovals and planet-circling bands are shallow or deeply rooted to the interior.

Eyes also appears to also have a pretty big flaw, with Hi'iaka and Namaka for example not orbiting their parent dwarf planet, only hanging statically, and the orbits of Saturns' moons appeared to be jittery and glitchy in some circumstances. Eyes also has ambient light which is annoying and wrong, but the kind of thing that only realism obsessed maniacs like myself actually care about.

Eyes also has orbit lines and labels turned on by default, which may be useful or unuseful depending upon what we end up doing.

Something I was thinking of was doing a walk through the solar system, with the students visiting each planet in order, drawing or writing what they see, and letting them explore any moons that the planet may have. This can be done at first with the instructor--me in this case--leading them through the first few steps, say, going to Mars and saying "oh hey what are these little stars nearby?" Then timewarping to see the stars move around Mars, seeing if anyone gets that it's moons, or telling them about the moons. Then they'll go search the solar system on their own. They can also record any other observations they make about the solar system in general. At the end I'd like to then ask the group what all they discovered about the solar system that was particularly interesting. I'm wondering if they'd notice how things are mostly all coplanar--or as the kids might say, flat--and if they notice that closer planets and moons orbit faster. If I find they don't, it may be worth modifying the plan to teach them about these aspects of the solar system directly.

This is all still in the early planning phases. We need to actually get clearance to install these programs on the computers, and we need to find ways of integrating this as much as possible into what they're already learning in their class.

Mom also suggested taking small groups out of the class to play Simple Rockets, an iPad app/game (essentially a 2D, dirt-cheap version of Kerbal Space Program) that we've used successfully in the past to teach rocket science to younger kids and some basic orbital mechanics to older kids. The astronomy unit is paired with space exploration, so it would be nice to get that in as well.

Celestia and Eyes, alongside other programs such as Universe Sandbox 2 and even my dear game Kerbal Space Program may also be useful to y'all for your classes, though I get the impression the curriculum and labs for those are fairly set in stone.

-Greg