Instructional focus heightened with new Common Core Curriculum
From Staff Reports
Eighth grade students will experience life as professional astronomers in a weekend double star workshop from Feb. 28 to March 2 at Vanguard Preparatory School, accourding to a school news release.
In accordance with new California Common Core Curriculum, eighth graders are learning more than facts and figures from a textbook.
There is more emphasis on the three Rs of learning — rigor, relevance and relationships — and a greater focus on the 4 Cs (creativity, critical thinking, communication and collaboration). Vanguard’s students will be actively researching, experimenting, publishing and presenting their measurements of double stars.
Double stars are stars that are gravitationally bound to one another, but appear to the naked eye as a single point of light, the release states. It’s possible with modest astronomy equipment to measure the separation and the angle of these stars.
Astronomers from throughout California are visiting Vanguard to assist these 32 student astronomers who were selected from a pool of 85 applicants. These selected students were required to attend after-school sessions to learn the technique of measuring double stars and how to write like a scientist.
Teams of six to seven students are matched with an experienced astronomer to record their results. On the concluding day of the workshop each team compiles their data into a journal article for submission to the “Journal of Double Star Observations” along with a team presentation. This experience is designed to expose students to the rigor of professional science (applications, research, experimenting, publishing and presenting) while combining students’ natural curiosity of astronomy, according to the release.
The visiting astronomers will be using high-powered telescopes to view double stars. The brightest star is referred to as the primary star and the fainter star is denoted as the secondary star. A special eyepiece will be used to measure angular separation. The specific distance between the stars is not measured, but rather the angle between the stars as seen from earth. Publishing this data allows future astronomers to inspect the quality of the measurements and combine other measurements to determine the exact orbital path of the double star.