Summer SAVY, Session 3 Day 4, “Space and Story: Structure of the Universe” (5th-6th)
We started the day with President Obama and President Kennedy’s speeches on space exploration. Students read and annotated the speeches, then worked with their groups on a text analysis wheel discussing how main points were developed and organized, looking for evidence used to support ideas, and comparing the main focus of speeches: space development for peace instead of war, space development to boost economy by creating new jobs, space exploration because it aligns with our nation’s character, space exploration because it benefits the entire human civilization, etc.
Later in the day, students worked on a creative task of writing and illustrating a science fiction short story, a long poem, a play, or a comic book, synthesizing newly acquired knowledge from various texts and sources used in class. They will present their writings to the class on Friday. Upon completion of the creative writing task, students learned more about Stephen Hawking’s ideas on the origin of the universe, took notes, asked questions, and generated ideas to experiment with in the PhET Colorado Simulation lab on our Solar System. There, students ran multiple experiments on how mass, velocity, and gravity direct planets’ behavior in space. It is a fabulous resource, and I would encourage you to allow students to access it at home to explore various simulations and conduct labs. The slightly crazy but wildly popular and fun part of the day (last 10 minutes) was the creation of the self-contained universes inside the balloons by placing marbles and space junk (paper) into them and watching planets collide and create orbital paths. Some universes net untimely deaths after collisions with unknown sharp objects. Hopefully, a few will make it home in one piece and contribute to the happy memories of the joys of learning at SAVY.
As always, throughout the day, students had multiple opportunities to further develop their Space Concept Maps.
Questions of the day:
- What happens to positively and negatively charged particles near black holes?
- What was the logline for your short story?
- What did we observe during President Kennedy’s speech?
- Is the theory of general relativity compatible with quantum mechanics? Why or why not?
We cannot wait to see everyone again tomorrow and read students’ science fiction stories.