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Classroom Activity: Kepler's Laws of Planetary Motion

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 February 2018

Y. Tsubota
Y. Tsubota*
Affiliation:
Keio Senior High School, 4-1-2 Hiyoshi, Kouhoku-ku, Yokohama 223, Japan

Extract

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This activity was originally developed by a group of teachers in Japan during 1960s under the influence of the American Curriculum-Reform Movement. This was used in Earth Sciences in order to develop the students’ cognitive skill. Kepler had been trying to analyze Tycho's observations of Mars, fitting them into the Copernican orbital system. It simply would not work. The problem is with the circular orbit that the Copernican system still used. Mars obviously did not have a circular orbit about the Sun. So Kepler tried a variety of other geometrical shapes, until he finally found the ellipse.

Type
Section Six
Information
International Astronomical Union Colloquium , Volume 162: New Trends in Astronomy Teaching , 1998 , pp. 306 - 311
Copyright
Copyright © 1996

References

Churttrand, M. R. & Tirion, W., 1991, The Audubon Society Field Guide to the Night Sky, Alfred Knopf, Inc., New York.Google Scholar
Morrison, D & Owen, T., 1988, The Planetary System, Addison-Wesley, New York. Many Japanese Standard TextbooksGoogle Scholar