Author(s):
This poster will describe our project on the design and study of smartphone simulations, innovative tools for improving students’ understanding of astronomy concepts. The project takes advantage of the tremendous prevalence of smartphones among today’s college students and students’ strong affinity for them. We believe this technology provides a unique opportunity for educators to forge connections by delivering interactive science visualizations to students on the devices that they so strongly value. The project will develop at least a dozen html5 simulations targeted at smartphones. They will focus on commonly taught topics spanning introductory astronomy that lend themselves well to visualization. Each simulation will contain embedded questions that can be assigned to focus student exploration. We will describe the design and classroom usage frameworks and illustrate example simulations. These efforts are motivated by the critical need to generate knowledge regarding facilitating student learning using the smartphones that are so important to our students in their daily lives.We will also share early results from an ongoing research project. The project will address three research questions: 1) how does the use of smartphone simulations influence undergraduate students’ attitudes related to astronomy (and science in general)? 2) how does the use of smartphone simulations influence undergraduate students’ conceptual understanding related to astronomy? and 3) what affordances and constraints of smartphone-based simulations impact undergraduate students’ attitudes and conceptual understanding related to astronomy? Our research study uses a sequential embedded mixed methods design, where the quantitative phase will serve as the primary source of data collection, informing the qualitative phase. Surveys are given early in the semester assessing student content knowledge and their attitudes toward astronomy and science in general. This data will establish baseline conceptual understanding and student attitudes towards astronomy. Analysis of these data will guide the subsequent qualitative data collection by informing the selection of participants for interviews. The interview protocol will focus on student attitudes towards astronomy and the value and relevance of using smartphone-based simulations while learning astronomy. All simulations will include Creative Commons licenses and made publicly available via the UNL astronomy education website at https://astro.unl.edu where they will be available to the instructors of the 300,000 students who take introductory astronomy each year. We will provide workshops facilitating adoption at national and local conferences and will publish both research and practitioner articles. We anticipate that the combination of easy-to-use tools and educational research demonstrating their effectiveness will be the first steps enabling a national paradigm shift in the teaching of introductory astronomy, where instructors regularly ask students to pull out their smartphones and explore using simulations.
Coauthors
Deepika Menon, University of Nebraska, Lincoln, Nebraska; Adam N. Davis, Wayne State College, Wayne, Nebraska; Manda J. Williamson, University of Nebraska, Lincoln, Nebraska; Christopher M. Siedell, University of Nebraska, Lincoln, Nebraska
