Summer SAVY, Session 3 Day 3, “Space and Story: Structure of the Universe” (5th-6th)
We started the day by going over students’ analysis of short stories by Asimov and Bradbury, focusing on how literary elements interact to promote meaning within the text and evaluating how each author used theme, symbols, and mood to provide insight into the nature of humanity. From lively, deep, and insightful discussions on science fiction, we moved on to writing a six-line poem about time using Einstein, Asimov, and Bradbury for inspiration. Students illustrated their poems with imagery related to the concepts they explored in their poems, posted completed poems on the board, performed them in front of the class, and left notes for each other with moving, encouraging, sometimes silly, but always meaningful feedback. The poetry board and performance were a spectacular success, and students kept gravitating toward it to read and reread each other’s work all day.
From poetry we moved onto the nature of black holes: we read informational article, watched a short video, took notes, had a profound discussion on the relationship between gravity, theory of general relativity, black holes, and the death of stars, followed by a hands-on experiment where students created a star, collapsed it in multiple stages, measured its demise, and ended up with several active black holes in our very classroom. Do not be surprised if aluminum foil and balloons start disappearing at home – SAVY scientists are at work, keeping the universe flush with collapsing stars.
As we walked through the day’s curriculum, students had multiple opportunities to work on their space concept maps, adding new knowledge, connections, and questions to them. We wrapped up the day with the introduction to the Brief History of Time and Stephen Hawking, using this opportunity to take notes, formulate new questions on the nature of the universe, its structure, and the continuous human quest to understand the world we live in. I look forward to continuing our quest for knowledge about the universe tomorrow.
Questions to ask:
- Why was there no automatic feeder for the dog in Bradbury’s story?
- What pushed Hawking to come up with the idea of how the universe was born?