El Fin

FAVORITE   
  During this semester in Space Science, I have had a few favorite topics and projects. My favorite project was the electromagnetic spectrum newsletter based on the WebQuest. I loved this project because I'm not quite fond of group projects, but I liked that we could easily confer with classmates to check our answers and information. The spectrum may not have been my favorite topic, but the creativity involved in this project made it my favorite. The life cycle of stars was my favorite topic, because it's fascinating that such massive objects change, are born, and die just like animals, plants, and people. The fact that this study can help us to understand how a star started is really cool, too!
LEAST FAVORITE    
     My least favorite technology that we utilized was Glogster. The project itself was fun because we got to research stars, but Glogster made the whole process frustrating and tedious. PowerPoints would definitely have made for an easier, and better organized, presentation. My least favorite project was the galaxy project, because, though I loved VoiceThread, the websites provided to us for research has varying and inconsistent information.
WHAT I WOULD CHANGE
     One thing I learned in Space Science this year is that there is a plethora of ways to present projects: PowerPoints, Glogs, VoiceThreads, Blogs, Newsletters, and posters. Obviously not everyone is going to love every single one of these methods, so I propose that you introduce the ways of presenting at the beginning of the semester, and then give students the choice of their method. Personally I feel like some of my presentations would have been more organized and less stressful if I had been able to make PowerPoints or newsletters for everything.
HARDEST TO BELIEVE
     I think that there were two topics this year that I really could not wrap my head around. Black holes were definitely impossible for me to understand, because they are invisible, "eat everything", and have massive gravity without being, well, massive. The model of a black hole where it makes a "dip" in the "sheet" that is the universe actually made me even more confused on the topic. The Big Bang was also difficult for me to understand, though I definitely believe it. Just the fact that nothing existed before the Big Bang is hard for me to grasp, though I'd love to learn more on the topic.

Thunderdell!

     

     The Return to the Moon Challenge project had us get into groups of six, then further divide into two research teams: design and site. I was on the site team, which chose three potential locations for our lunar base. The three we chose were the Peary Crater rim, Plaskett Crater rim, and Malapert Mountain on the rim of the Shackleton Crater. We decided on the Malapert Mountains because they receive near-constant sunlight, have only a two day lunar night, and are tall enough to have great radio transmission. We also had to determine a power source (solar power) and an experiment (greenhouse). The design team helped with these aspects, and they also designed a model of the base and determined the necessary resources and recycling that the team would need. Finally, we had to think of how our base could expand in the future and become self-sufficient. 

     I really liked the large teams for this project. Having three people per team made the research easier, and when someone on either team couldn't think of something to do, they could always help the other team. We definitely had sufficient time for this project, which allowed us to build fantastic models and really understand the factors involved in building a lunar base.

     I didn't like the research portion of this project, because it was difficult to sort out factual and speculative information on possible lunar bases. For example, some things were not fully explained in the research (how to convert water ice to rocket fuel) so we had trouble fully understanding them. 

     To make this project better, maybe Mrs. Gratton could add links to the resources drive to pages with credible information about the moon, so that we would fully understand the environment that the team would be going into. I think this would make it much easier to begin research if we had background information to go from!