GalileoScopes for Grades 4-6

A GalileoScope Grade 4-6 Experience

In May and June, I volunteered to help out with St. Kateri school's "Let's Build a Telescope" class. The idea is for the kids to get a hands-on learning opportunity, a regular part of series of their "Maker Space" series. Their teacher had seen RASC member Ian Doktor talk about the Galileoscope at a teacher's conference. Orla Aaquist, an RASC member and prof at Grant MacEwen University had acquired some 60 Galileoscopes as part of the 2009 IYA (International Year of Astronomy) outreach program.

The design is quite smart: only a handful of plastic parts, a 50mm coated achromat objective, a simple Kellner eyepiece, a simple barlow (also doubling as a negative Galilean eyepiece), and some O-rings to hold it together. It comes together and can get taken apart again and again, and best of all, no outrageous claims of 500x nor robotic mission images of planets on the box, just what you would see.

Thankfully I had two separate sessions so that the second one went a lot more smoothly. The teacher had also wanted me to make a short presentation, which I did in the first session but we dropped for the second for the sake of time.

With only one hour available and the key goal to give a mix of grade 4-6 kids with hands-on, I decided to half-build the scopes at home to start with, and this turned out to be a really good idea, since it still took 15 minutes to assemble them in class. I pre-assembled the focusing tube which is a bit finicky with its two O-rings, and I already had the objective end done with one O-ring for the front half. Before we did it step by step, I showed them how a scope is really an empty tube whose only purpose is to hold everything in alignment. That way, the kids, working in pairs, only needed to put the focuser locking ring on, the other plops in the eyepiece, then one of them holds apart the focusing end for the other to slip the tube in past the stop. Now you and I can do that in a minute or two, but keeping the varied age and skilled group synchronized takes patience and time.

We then split into two groups. The first set split up and cycled through 4 stations already set up with scopes pointing and focused at pictures stuck above the various exit doors at the end of long hallways. They had to make some simple notes about the Moon, a star cluster, a spiral galaxy and a gas cloud, with the built-in surprise that everything is upside down. The second half I showed them how a movie projector works (need a darkened classroom for that) by changing the distance between a bright 9-LED flashlight, the objective, and watching how the focused image got bigger and bigger (and farther and fainter). They also did their own experiences focusing near and far, pointing using the fin and notch "finder sight", and finding out just how shaky their hands are.

We came back together, did a little debrief, and in the last minute, I told them to avoid buying telescopes with 500x on the box, and instead to start with Terry Dickinson's Nightwatch, and remember that there are astronomy magazines, internet apps, and an astronomical society to help.

Bang, that was an hour, come and gone. I could see grade 6s doing the full assembly, but then one hour would not be enough to actually experience *using* it. Multiple sessions as part of an astronomy unit, timed with a morning Third Quarter or afternoon First Quarter Moon for actual use is within reach. Worthwhile for the grade 9s too. Orla had added some activity ideas over and above the basic the instructions, but I can well understand the reluctance/discomfort of many grade 6 teachers to doing it themselves: too easy to get things wrong and not be able to explain why everything is blurry or how they assembled things backwards. There's nothing complicated as we know, but the time to practice and gain the familiarity is something that is difficult to insert in an already very busy life (remember they have a lot of marking to do during evening hours).