Old School Planets Lesson
Did you know that the infamous pirate Blackbeard’s real name was Edward Teach?
That is all I have to say about that.
On to a lesson.
So I’m going with a hybrid physics style this fall. Half astronomy, half modeling. I’m going to open with a proportional reasoning exercise. This was a mathematical skill/reasoning ability identified by the faculty at Iowa State University (normally known for their mutations of corn, but in this case, physics). My biggest flaw as a teacher is glossing over the simple stuff and allowing the SBG machinery to show me what’s been missed. So, proportional reasoning it is:
I get them a yoga ball (radius = 1m). This is the Sun, I say. It is currently August 15th, 23:00, I say, and our classroom happens to be the center of the solar system.
Go find the planets, and use this website; up–on the picture–is North in our town.
This lesson has a very classic feel to it. The teacher does a lot of up front work (hiding wooden stakes with planet pictures on them), and the students are left with a contrived tasks, interesting though it is. There’s a lot of slick student questioning that I’m glossing over, but, honestly, I just like doing this kind of thing.
I hid the planets. By my calculations, with a 1-meter Sun, you get kilometer distances for the outer planets (not including pluto, I don’t say that though, it’s funnier if they go looking; hell, I didn’t even capitalize it.)
That puts students, during lunch time usually, almost klicks away traveling on some silly vector they may or may not have figured correctly. I ignore eccentricity, for now, and just use mean orbital distance. Invariably, students google such vocab words, and we get a standing list of questions that then pretty much motivates the rest of the semester.
Happy planet hunting, literally.
Release the Kraken: My Summer at ThThTh Industries LLC Fall 2011 Just Got Zany
[...] the educator side of blogging, Think, Thank, Thunksent out school kids in search of planets, quite literally while dy/dan applies his 3acts strategy [...]
This is a great activity. I’m assuming you’re making them find the planets’ “actual” locations on their orbits instead of having them just figure out the distance from the Sun in a straight line?
I think your calculations might be a bit off (though I could be misunderstanding how you did them. I used WolframAlpha to divide Neptune’s semi-major axis by the average diameter of the Sun and I get 3,234, which would mean the Neptune stake should be about 3,234 meters from the yoga ball. Again, I might’ve just misunderstood what you were doing there.
Jerzy, I’m also enjoying that link. Some interesting arguments there. Lots of places you could go with that one. :-)
I used the Wolfram Alpha and got the 3,234 factor as well. But when I look the numbers up on my own I get 7 million kilometers for the radius of the Sun, and about 4,500 million kilometers for the orbital radius of Neptune (scaled down to ~650 meters). I feel like I’m either just repeating the same mistake or something is amiss…?
I’m an idiot. 695,500 does not round to 7 million; it rounds to 700,000. http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-SLhcQfuSGcE/TbC9VER0R9I/AAAAAAAAAB8/l4Wio43GSIA/s1600/facepalm_picard2.jpg
I think you’re calculations might be off by a factor of 10.
Anywho, I was a little bored this morning, and I had thought about something very similar to this very recently, so I coded up a Google Maps mash-up with the GPS coordinates for the planets so that you can get them when you need to.
See: http://cerbo.ccmr.cornell.edu/cgi-bin/planets/planets.py?lat=42.449741&lon=-76.48165&sun=0.1
The locations in the google maps correspond the ones in the picture you link to. Planetary positions are calculated according to this: http://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/txt/aprx_pos_planets.pdf
Code is available here: https://gist.github.com/1149902
This is awesome. Really really really awesome. I used wolfram alpha to verify it. Do you think they’re culling the same data to produce their visualization?
What a fun exercise. I’m jealous of your students!
The astronomy theme sounds great. Maybe you can find a copy of the 1885 pamphlet “One Hundred Proofs That the Earth Is Not a Globe” (or something similar) and get your students demolish each of the common-sense “proofs”…
http://www.futilitycloset.com/2011/08/15/plane-truth/
I love comments like this. I never would have found this on my own. Thank you! I put it on facebook for my students, and they’re already working on it (school starts in a week)
Hooray for the internet! :)