About a week ago we wrapped up a unit on Astronomy! I personally loved this unit because I’m really interested in space. This was also our final unit and project in science 10! We kicked off the unit by downloading an app called StarChart. This app showed the sky, solar system and universe in the past, present and future. All you had to do was select a date and point to the sky. With this app we studied our moon cycle and our solar system, this gave us just a glimpse into our astronomy unit!

For this project we got into pairs of two, then picked a topic in astronomy. This could range anywhere from stars to black holes. My partner (Sofia) and I decided to choose “the components and scale of our solar system”. For this project we actually got to create our own criteria sheet (what we would be marked on). For this we got a sheet with all the core competencies, we then circled which ones we would be using in our project. After, we wrote a mini paragraph beside each competency stating specifically what we were going to be doing to show our understanding of these competency’s. We also didn’t have to much criteria for the format of the project, we could do anything from a movie to a keynote.

Our project topic was components and scale of our solar system but we decided to focus on the different astronomical measurements of the galaxy. Before we began to create our actual project we created a poster with our ideas and driving question. The class then went around to each poster and gave critique using sticky notes. Here’s ours!

After we received the critique we realized that our original idea probably wasn’t the best because it was something you could easily google. We then had the idea to focus more on measurment of the sky, like light years and arc seconds!

We ended up doing tons of research on three main measurements: parsecs, arcseconds and light years. After we got all this information we added it to a keynote along with pictures. The purpose of our presentation was to mainly teach the class what we had learned. We thought the best way to do this was add some sort of question the class could answer at the end. Click here to see our keynote we created, see if you can answer the question!

We then presented our keynote to the class as well as the question at the end using our core competencies communication skills. I would say it was a success, but I think it would have helped if we added some visual examples for each measurement since they were really difficult to understand. After our presentation we had to listen to everybody else’s so we could obviously learn from them! We heard everything about black holes, star life cycles, our solar systems scale, living on mars, the Big Bang and other theory’s! Overall everything had some connection to the galaxy and other theory’s. I ended up learning a lot from the presentations because my classmates created very thorough explanations for the class to easily understand! Here’s a web I created of all the awesome concepts, theory’s and ideas I learned!

Overall this unit was very short but I learned a lot as well as improving my core competency skills along the way. I learned many different ways we can measure our solar system, got a deeper understanding of many theory’s and improved my researching skills! So I would say this unit was definitely a success!