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Planets, Comets and the Night Sky begins with a sunset and an examination of the winter sky and what can be seen, both with the naked eye, and through telescopes. A section deals with NASA's Venus, Mars and Saturn. Comets are discussed in general. The program ends with a meteor shower and a sunrise.

But, the heart of the program deals with "Concrete Operations" and a participatory experiment or two.

According to Piaget this age/learning level is when the students acquire the ability to use "Concrete Operations" such as number, class inclusion, conservation, associativity. In other words, the student can now handle concepts and understand concrete events, but not the abstract!

As a result in the heart of this program the students are taken through each concept, step by step, and by using the discovery method, they are allowed to participate in the programs experiments and draw their own conclusions. But, the students are always led through to the final result!

Concepts analyzed in Planets, Comets and the Night Sky are: rotation of the Earth (day/night), and the apparent and real motions of the planets.

This is accomplished by letting the students participate in an experiment to analyze retrograde motion and to discover real and apparent motion.

In the process, Kepler's 1st and 2nd Laws of Planetary motion are discussed, analyzed and illustrated using the planetarium projector and animated lap dissolves.
 
 

Special Effects Needed
A planetarium projector capable of showing retrograde motion. (It is possible to build a simple retrograde planet projector). A two projector dissolve (one projector will work, but, beg or borrow a second projector... build a dissolve controller and you'll wonder why you didn't do this sooner!).

Suggested Special Effects
Fiber optic or grain of wheat super nova, orrery, part pan (slide projector with tray is ok), slewing mirror, rotating gate projector, unveiler, meteor shower (Can use pointer), sunrise/sunset. You could get along without these effects...

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