astronomy - Astronomy honor
BASIC DESCRIPTION
First Semester:
We start the year talking about constellations, the moon and the phases of the moon, how the sun moves, what causes the seasons, and the earth’s orbit. A lot of time is spent going through the solar system, looking at each of the planets, and learning about their various properties. We learn a bit about the laws of physics that explain planetary motion - we talk about gravity and Kepler’s laws.
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Second Semester:
We start looking at the sun, what it is, the different properties like the layers of the sun and the fusion process. Then, we learn about star formation and the life cycle of a star. We end the year talking about galaxies.
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Grade Level: 12
Number of Meetings per week: 4
Full year or half year: Full year
Number of Credits: 1
Prerequisite/helpful classes?: Physics I, Chemistry I, Biology I
CLASS STRUCTURE
About twice a week, we do powerpoint lecture notes and students ask questions. Then, for the other days of the week, students will be working on something, like using a computer simulation to look at how the planets move or doing a simple paper-and-pencil lab where we plot the orbit of Mars.
INTERESTING ASSIGNMENT
We did a project where students investigated an exoplanet. From observatory-collected data, they figured out the mass and size of the exoplanet. They learned a bit of how astronomers detect exoplanets and can say “this planet is this size”.
HOMEWORK / HONORS ASSIGNMENTS
They will have one written assignment per week that might be answering a few questions about the topic. The honors students will have to do some math calculations. Then generally, we will try to have at least 2 projects per quarter. There is usually a quiz every week.
WHO SHOULD TAKE THIS COURSE?
Anyone. There are some kids in the class that are taking AP science classes, but there are also other students who are on the other end of the academic spectrum. There’s something for everyone - we do stuff that satisfies the hard-core science people like “I get to do a calculation!” and there are kids that are like “The pictures are cool and I want to do it”. There’s also a creative aspect to the class - one of our first projects was to design a scaled solar system and one of the project choices was to create a children's book about the topic.
WHAT STUDENTS SAY
“This class is definitely worth taking because it allows me to acquire a whole new level of knowledge about space and astronomy that I did not previously have. My favorite part of the class is definitely watching movies. For example we have watched movies like Interstellar or The Martian. Also, most of the homework is projects which tend to be pretty fun and don’t take a lot of time since you work on them a lot during class time”
- Caleb L. '19
“It’s not a ton of work, but it’s pretty interesting to learn something that is not taught in a traditional physics or chemistry class. Sometimes, we do little research projects, like on a particular astronaut or a probe - you get to pick something and learn about it or make a video. There’s lots of creative projects.”
- Emma W. ‘19