Version 1 Appears?


There have never been any ‘true’ version numbers for the Our Solar Siblings materials. Changes, updates, deletions and additions are so frequent that, depending on your definition, there could have been 10 versions or 10 hundred versions over the past six years. Having said that, we could never have called them “complete”, as there was always a major improvement that could be made. This is still true, it is part of our educational design that we never stop updating and tinkering with the curriculum materials and approaches. Over summer, though, much work has been put into the curriculum materials to such an extent that the February 2016 version of the OSS materials somewhat resembles what could be imagined to be “Version 1.0”.

MaterialsCover

 

 

“Version 1.0” in particular …….

  • Provides a major extension to Project 2 to include coverage of the Big Bang, Dark Energy, Dark Matter and the Large Scale Structure of the Universe, thus making Project 1 and 2 taken together to comprehensively and coherently cover the Year 10 “Science Understanding” curriculum statement as well as instilling a cosmic perspective in the students.
  • Provides an approach to address the “Science as a Human Endeavour” Year 10 curriculum strand concurrently with the materials.
  • Provides a pre and post implementation reflection activity for the students’ cosmological beliefs.

 

 

Proj2

 

While all projects in Our Solar Siblings address various items from the “Science Inquiry Skills” section of the Australian Curriculum, Project 3 continues to provide the scaffold for students to be able to address all of these items through guided or open inquiry. Project 3 is also a close fit to the content of the International Baccalaureate curriculum. Undertaking Project 3 provides sufficient skills to undertake independent research which we are more than happy to directly mentor. Some of this research ends up in actual astronomical research publications with students as co-authors!

 

To get a copy of the latest materials, you can either email Michael at mfitzasp@gmail.com or put in your details at the sidebar and we will send you through the materials either as a link (if you can patiently wait to download 4.3GB) or post you a USB with the materials. We are working on beta-testing some approaches where we provide assessment and marking support for you (read: we assess and mark for you!), if you would like to help try this out, please let us know!

 

Other recent additions include in the menu up the top of this page, there is a link to a padlet wall, which contains images from a variety of schools around Australia and beyond. We have also stealthily created a Facebook page of recent note.

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