Summer SAVY 2016 (Session 5, Day 2) – A Walk Under the Stars: Astronomy and Astrophysics

Posted by hallep on Tuesday, July 26, 2016 in Grade 5, Grade 6, SAVY.

Day 2 of Astrophysics was a really busy! We began by finishing up our discussion of Newton’s law of gravity and how it relates to planets and their orbits. I then gave each pair of students a piece of a “puzzle” involving how our solar system formed. Each group became experts in their topic and had to draw and explain some rather complicated physical phenomena to other groups. They also had to piece together what the other groups would tell them. By the end, each group synthesized all of the complex information they’d heard into a comic strip of how the solar system formed from a large gas cloud. We then had each group contribute to a class comic strip on the board! We followed this by discussing the difficulty of travelling outside of our Solar System and the need for us to understand light. We then began exploring the different physical properties of light, and are just starting to discover exactly how we can look at objects light years away and discover the elements of which they are made!