Two Innovative Devices for the Teaching of Astronomy

Extract

The teaching of astronomy in schools should start by explaining the most elementary phenomena, which are a part of everyone’s daily experience. Before proceeding to advanced topics, teachers of astronomy in school have to make sure that these very basic phenomena are fully understood. Since many programs have a gap at the elementary level, many people have foggy notions or disconcertingly wrong ideas of elementary matters. The seasons are a well-known case of a badly-understood phenomenon even for highly educated people. Still these people are honest and should not be laughed at. They do not understand the basic concepts of our contemporary scientific world, simply because these topics have not been taught properly. This problem raises a challenge for developing better ways of teaching astronomy. In order to show that there are specific new solutions to this challenge, I am presenting two innovative devices, which have been developed at the Universität Münster . The first example shows how the seasons may be successfully explained with a physical model that changes color when heated. The other example refers to the visibility of the stars and their disappearance in the daytime.