User:Mu301/Planning

Ladd Observatory will be sponsoring educational outreach for the schools in the Rhode Island area starting in 2008. This will include workshops for teachers, activities for the classroom, online lessons and learning projects. The materials to implement this outreach program will be developed and hosted at Wikiversity.

Projects

 * SunSpotter Solar Telescope: Background education would be supplied to students before the activity in order to familiarize themselves with solar phenomena. Preliminary solar observations will be carried out with solar filter sunglasses.  Students would work in groups of 3 with one SunSpotter telescope per group.  They will be asked to sketch their observations of sunspots over the duration of the observation session - not only in location, but size and shape as well.  Each of the student's sketches will be scanned into digital format in order to compile an archive over time of successive observation sessions.  Therefore, students can compare and contrast their sketches with past student's sketches in the archive.  The idea that the sun is not static, but changes and evolves over time will be a key educational component that will be stressed to the students.
 * H-alpha Solar Telescope
 * Spectroscope: Star images will be obtained from Ladd Observatory and saved in digital format.  These images can then be supplied to students in the classroom for analysis.  Specifically, the students will be asked to determine the chemical composition of each star based on its spectra.  Further, the classification of different stars due to their varying composition will be implemented.
 * Weather Station / Lightning Detector
 * Meteor Camera
 * Time Keeping
 * Cosmic Ray Detector

Schedule

 * Late 2007 - order equipment
 * April 2008 - begin teacher workshops
 * Sept. 2008 - install weather station and sky camera

Partners

 * Ladd Observatory at Brown University
 * The Champlin Foundations
 * Rhode Island Space Grant
 * Wikiversity
 * NSF GK-12 Fellowship