Didactic Guide

Two articles about the experience are available published in Spanish:

• Mission to Stars: un Proyecto de Investigación alrededor de la astronomía, las misiones espaciales y la investigación científica. Revista Eureka de Enseñanza y Divulgación de las Ciencias, 14 (1), 98–114. Jordi Domènech-Casal, Neus Ruiz-España.

• Resignificación STEM y escuela. Escenas ABP desde el Itinerario Minerva. Boletín Ciencia Tecnología y Sociedad 15, 57-65 (2021). Jordi Domènech-Casal. https://wp.me/p25seH-Tu

Description

Astronomy teaching is usually performed in the frame of our Solar System. This could be a good approach 30 years ago, but the present frames of Astronomy are weel far from it. To prepare our students to understand the news about astronomic research and to adopt positions as citizens to take decisions, even in the frame of political and budgetary priorities, it is important to enlarge their knowledge on Universe.

In this activity, students work in teams that compete with each other to design their own mission, with budgetary and technical limitations. They choose their goals and design a Space Telescope to get the goals. At the end of the activity, students present their projects and the value of the mission is calculated according to budgetary and scientific parameters, selecting the best mission to be accomplished.

Goals

• • Understand how astronomic research is done, by participating in the construction of an astronomy research project.

  • Learning the main parts an components of the Universe (Andromeda, Orion arm, Milky Way...) and being able to localize them.

  • Developing high-order Scientific Skills as experiment designing, planification and scientific communication.

  • Measuring distances, calculating scales and units conversion.

  • Presenting a project in digital an oral formats.

  • Constructing Multimedia representations of astronomic celestial bodies.

  • Constructing physical representations of complex objects.

  • Working in teams in a collaborative and competitive environment.

  • Organizing their own work with the help of a Gantt diagram.

Class Organization

• • At the beginning of the activity, badges are elaborated by students. Wearing the badges during the activity is a gamification key that promotes their implication in the project.

  • Respect the roles: at the beginning, roles ares distributed among team members. Use the roles to help the teams and make visible to students you are using it. Call the commanders and give them instructions. Call the Engineer Officers and clarify their doubts on calculations. And so on.

  • It is important to allow them to organize their work, and to teach them to work with the Gantt diagram in order to make them able to construct their own diagrams in future projects.

  • Make sure that at the beginning of the class students have a clear idea of what they want to get of the session and how to do it. Let some minutes at the end of the class

  • Be available for your students, but don't solve their problems. When they ask you a question, reformulate their question in order to help them arrive to their own conclusions.

  • During the activity, students need to use the computer. Be sure they have a clear idea of what they want to do before switching on the computer, as attention dispersion could happens.

  • The complete didactic sequence can take 12 sessions o 1 hour. If possible, use 2h-length sessions rather than 1h.

Hints and ideas for further development

Sequence allows easy modifications by:

• • Changing the number of research goals.

  • Including new goals and detectors.

  • Including cooperation dynamics (i.e. changing temporally or definitively a member of a team to another team as as visiting scientist, or allowing two teams to construct a consortium).

  • Including aleatory factors (accidents, supplementary costs, unexpected discoverings...) to increase the Gamification dimension of the activity.

  • Including new tasks in the didactic sequence (Additional tasks)

Important Notices

It is important to make students understand that a Space Telescope is not a Spaceship that needs to arrive near to its targets to get information, and that the extension of universe and the physics limitations makes impossible to explore directly some interesting parts of our galaxy. News from Solar System missions could make them believe that it is currently possible to send ships outside the Solar System.

This activity is not constructed nor approved by ESA, and we are using its name in order to create a relevant context for our students, an at the same time making them know about the European Spatial Agency. Data from this activity (Research Goals, Detector prices,...) are invented taking as a depart real goals and prices.