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http://online.chabotcollege.edu/shildreth/astronomy/a30syll.html
An Introduction to the Universe
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Course Goals | |
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| Instructor: Scott Hildreth | email: shildreth@chabotcollege.edu |
| Office: 2013 Voice mail: (510) 723 - 7468 | |
Office Hours: Monday Evenings before the lab, 5:30 - 6:30 PM; Also Mondays & Fridays 2:15 - 3:15 PM, Tuesdays & Thursdays from Noon until 1 (if I don't have a meeting), and Fridays 11 AM - Noon, in my office or in the physics/astronomy lab. You can also make an appointment to see me at another time that fits your schedule. If you ever come by and miss me, please leave a note with your name, phone number, and the best time to reach you, and I will call you back. I will check email multiple times every day, and I recommend this as the best way to reach me! However, you MUST include a clear SUBJECT message in your email, and your name, to ensure that your email will not be treated as "SPAM" and automatically deleted. I will check my voicemail messages often, but not daily. If you have an urgent need, and cannot get to email, leave me a voicemail message but do not expect an answer back the same day.
Prerequisite: Astronomy 10 or 20, which may be taken concurrently
Required Text: Hildreth & Smith, Practical Astronomy Labs, 2008 Edition (if you get an older version from the bookstore, let me know and I'll make copies of any changed activities for you.)
Additional Required Equipment: Edmund Scientific Star & Planet Locator (or equivalent); a calculator with scientific notation (exponents); colored pens or pencils.
This 1-unit lab is designed to help you understand astronomy, learn how to use telescopes, make scientific observations, and enjoy the stars and constellations. We will be learning about astronomical calculations, and experimental techniques; in addition, we will have an opportunity to use the telescopes to observe celestial bodies. The lab has proven to be very beneficial to students taking it concurrently with Astronomy 10 or 20, as many of the concepts discussed in lecture will be revisited with these hands-on lab activities. Astronomy 30 satisfies the general education science laboratory requirement.
Course Description:
Astronomy 30 is a laboratory class, not lecture; I will not spend a great deal of time reviewing concepts from the lecture classes. The exercises you will work on require patience, careful measurement, efficient group work, and active collaboration with lab partners. Science today is often done by groups of people working together, sharing data and hypotheses as they search for order in the universe. I strongly encourage you to work with others - the class is not graded on a curve, and you aren't competing with your classmates.
Participation & Lab Review Requirements:
Each member of the group should actively participate in gathering data and answering questions. Each person must fill out their own data sheets for the labs. Each person must turn in their own data sheets at the beginning of the next class period to be checked and returned. Along with the data, each person should turn in a short, typed, 2-3 paragraph review of the activity, along with the names of all group members, and the date and title of the assignment.
Labs assignments will be graded on a 30-point scale that includes the results of the exercise and your individual lab summaries, your attendance & active participation in the activity. Note that arriving late will be recorded and will affect your grade, as will simply copying work from your lab partners and not actively participating
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Excellent work ("A") On-time attendance and active participation. Data & review turned in on time, with date & group members listed. All questions answered correctly, and summary reviews are thorough, thoughtful, and useful. |
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Good Work ("B") On-time attendance and active participation. Data & review turned in on time, with date & group members listed. All questions answered, mostly correct, and/or the summary review is OK. A few data errors. |
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Fair Work ("C")
Late attendance or inactive participation. Or, data or review late/missing/incomplete. Most questions answered, but some blanks are left, or some data errors. |
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Barely Passing Work ("D") Late attendance or inactive participation. Data or review late/missing/incomplete. Some questions answered, but blanks are left, or lots of data errors. |
Course Grade Requirements
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Requirements
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including no more than three lab exercises missed. |
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Not Passing
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Average score lower than 10; more than 3 lab exercises
missed.
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You can record your lab activity grades on the form in the front of the lab manual; please try to keep careful track of what assignments you have turned in, when you submitted them, who you worked with, and what scores you received.
I do not want a formal lab "write-up" each week. Instead, I need to understand whether your time was well spent. Please don't tell me what you did, or review the goals of the lab. Your reviews should address the following questions; missing some of these will reduce your overall lab grade
1. What was the title of the lab; on what date did you do the work, and who did you work with?
2) What was the best part of this activity? What did you learn? Did the lab help you understand material from the lecture class?
b) What was not enjoyable in this activity? Why? What would you suggest to make the lab even better?
3) Each lab has a major topic or concept that will serve as the primary goal for your experimentation. But every lab also is intended to illustrate how science works, too. How did tonight's activity help you understand the process of science? In particular, what pieces of the scientific "method" were involved, or played a significant part in the activity, and what did you learn about them?
- Observation (of phenomena, and of patterns in data)
- Analysis & Research of the observations, including discussion with peers and investigating prior datasets and hypotheses.
- Development of a Hypothesis that can be tested and established to be true or false.
- Development of an Experiment to test the Hypothesis
- Analyzing Data from the Experiment; identifying explanations and influences.
- Reporting of Data to Peers for independent review
- Publishing Results for review by others.
This part of the review is the most important, and worth the most in terms of credit. Don't neglect this!
The summaries are meant to help me improve the labs for future classes by incorporating your suggestions and criticisms. Feel free to be honest. You won't hurt my feelings (much!) by telling me you had trouble or did not enjoy an activity. But telling me how to make it so that you would enjoy it will certainly earn you a good score for the review and the lab. If your review is missing, you can turn in the lab data but you will receive a lower score for the activity.
You must be present and actively participating in a lab to get credit for the activity. If you are late to lab more than 15 minutes, your credit for the activity may be reduced; if you are consistently late, you will be considered absent and may be dropped. If you are going to miss a lab, please notify me ahead of time, and I will see if you can possibly do the work during another lab class. It may be possible for you to attend one of the other lab sections, but depending upon the weather and schedule, those classes may not be working on the same exercise that we would. Please check with me first. If you are forced to miss a class, it may be possible to do a makeup activity, but for some experiments there will not be any way to perform a makeup, and you will take a zero for that lab activity.
You are responsible for turning in your lab reports no later than one week after we finish the lab. If you are going to miss a lab, please drop off the previous week's work, or give it to a friend to turn in for you no later than one day after the lab; late work will receive a reduced score (at best a "20", and possibly lower if there are errors or omissions).
Your typed reviews and data from the prior week's activities are due in class at the start of the period, but if you must miss class, you can also leave them with me during office hours, or slide them under my office door, or send reviews to me as email to shildreth@chabotcollege.edu (no attachments, please - paste your review in the messages window). If you send me your reviews by email, you will need to turn in the lab data sheets by the next day (Wednesday) unless you and I have made a prior agreement.
Astronomy 30 Lab Review Examples
To give you a better idea of the kind of reviews I am looking for, here are two examples:
A Good Review....
Date: 1/25/07 Simple Telescope Lab
Lab Partners: Larry, Jian, Hidenari, Amy
"I found this activity to be much more difficult than I had anticipated, but by the end, things were starting to make much more sense. What I liked best was going outside with the telescopes, and learning how to use the telescope controls to move around and center the stars. I also liked your quizzing us on the stars, but we don't know them that well yet, so expecting us to remember all of the names isn't quite fair. But I am getting better at it!""What was most difficult for me was the math ratios; I need to go more slowly, and have more examples in the notebook. But my group really helped, and two of my partners were great in explaining how they got the angular sizes. I don't think I can do a new problem, but I think I see how to set it up.
"My suggested improvements to the lab include more telescopes, so that we don't have to wait quite as long. And more examples in the notebook for math problems. Also, we need to space the telescopes farther apart so that other people don't trip over ours and we can avoid their motions affecting our view. I would also like to know what stars are up in the sky before we go outside so that I know what to look for. Oh, and more hot chocolate! "
"This lab definitely involved experimentation, and in some cases making hypotheses (about what the image would look like). The significant thing this lab taught me about science was the need for mathematical abilities (in the research stage) and patience (in the outside experiment stage). It was hard to locate some of the stars and frustrating that we didn't know them as well as we would like."
And a not so useful review...
"I really liked tonight's activity. We used the telescopes to measure how much the star's shifted, and timed the star's motions. Then we used the math formulas to figure out the telescope field. My lab partners and I felt like we did everything right, and our numbers came out really good. I'd like to do more outside with the telescope."
Notice that the first review touched on all of the desired questions, did not simply repeat what the lab title and goal was, and showed that the author thought about the activity, and suggested improvements. And it included the date, title, and group members. The second review did not include date, title, and participants, nor did it address the questions, and did not help me to see whether the author really got something positive out of the experience.
Doing Well in the Course
Please note that just getting the "right" answers on the lab is not sufficient for a good grade. I expect you to get all of the answers correct by talking with your partners, asking questions in the lab of me and others, and collaborating with other groups. In addition to answering the questions, you need to critically analyze your work and the activity itself, to obtain excellent grades on the entire lab. To help you, remember that:
a) The lab review is always due one week AFTER the lab is completed, along
with all of your data. So you have lots of time
to look over your work, fill in any missing pieces, and write a comprehensive
review that addresses the required elements mentioned above.
c) My email is available 24/7 for you to use in sending me your lab reviews by their due dates, so even if you have to miss a week due to illness, work, or family requirements, you should still be able to get your past work in on time for grading. If you are going to miss a class, send the review on-time in an email, and give your data pages to a friend to drop off, drop them off yourself.
Please Dress Warmly! We will be outside on clear nights for up to two hours, so wear warm socks, gloves, and a hat to keep you comfortable!