What I have been waiting for this whole year, to learn about space. Like always we have a project that covers our learning from that unit. For our project we had a lot of freedom. We weren’t given certain criteria, we essentially created our own project. Our teacher gave us some guide lines on which topic we could focus on.
Topics:
Radioactivity and radiation in space
Nuclear reactions (how stars work)
Possibility of colonizing other planets (Mars or the Moon)
Star life cycles
Evidence for the big bang formation of the universe
First nations’ stories of creation
Components and scale of our solar system
Telescopes and astronomical measurement
Of course our teacher didn’t want multiple people choosing the same topic so each group of two or three submitted their top ether choices. Almost everyone got one of their top three choices.
My top choices were,
2. Colonizing of other planets
3. Star Cycles
Sydney, Isobel and I got our third choice, we researched the star life cycle . With our topic we needed to explain the star life cycle. Like all projects, we had a driving question. However, with this project we could create our own driving question. We wanted to talk about black holes and how the star cycle relates to black holes.
Once we had the general idea of our project, we needed to choose how we were going to be graded. Like I said earlier we could choose our own criteria that our teacher was going to grade us on.
- questioning and predicting
- Planning and conducting
- Processing and analyzing data and information
- Evaluating
- Applying and innovating
- Communicating
Our task was to choose three of these to be graded on. In class we did a peer critique where we did a gallery walk around the class. Every student have sticky notes to write constructive feedback for each project idea.
Our driving question and project idea:
Our feedback was to include more information about gravity since that plays a large role in the star cycle. The next step was to write exactly what we wanted to be graded on using a rubric.
Our group made a slide show to explain the star cycle and all of the slides tie together because at the end we made a slide about how all the stages relate to black holes. To help answer our question, we explained the role of gravity. There are a lot of explanations about each star in the slide show.
Check out our slide show!
Almost every group did a different topic and everyone had to present. While every group presented, we needed to make sure we payed attention because our last task was to create a mind map with information about the other topics. This showed our understanding on the whole unit. The mind map also shows how each of the topic are connected.
My mind map:
Overall from this project I learned all about astronomy. Even though this unit was pretty short, I still enjoyed it. Like I said I also learned about everyone else’s topics. This project deepened my understanding about astronomy. I also learned a lot about the star cycle and how they relate to black holes.