Building a planet for NASA

Sixth graders to benefit from evolving science lesson plan

By Susan Williams

'The hope is to work in some content from other branches of science—biology and chemistry, for example, in studying the origin of life, or physics as in how planets and stars form.'

Richard Durisen, IUB, Professor of Astronomy

With a three-year, $31,838 grant from the National Aeronautical and Space Administration (NASA) to fund them, Richard Durisen, a professor at IU Bloomington's Department of Astronomy, is working with William Boone, an IU professor of education in Bloomington, and Glenn Simonelli, a teacher at Lakewood Elementary School. They plan to teach kids about the solar system by letting them build their own planets. Forget the Ping-Pong balls and oranges, though you could buy a lot of each with that kind of money. These sixth graders will use computer calculations to simulate the birth of a new planet right before their wondering eyes.

Durisen and his colleagues are enthusiastic about creating the lesson plans, which will meet new guidelines for science instruction in Indiana.

"The project isn't just about astronomy," explained Durisen. "The hope is to work in some content from other branches of science—biology and chemistry, for example, in studying the origin of life, or physics as in how planets and stars form."

In creating the new lesson plans, officially dubbed "Build Your Own Planet: Development of Origins-Based Sixth-grade Science Units," Durisen is the astronomy researcher whose job is to make sure the content is current and accurate. As a teacher working toward an advanced education degree at IU, Glenn will launch classroom implementation of the material, and Boone, as an education researcher, will assess the project's classroom success.

The "build your own planet money" is a supplement to a $180,000 three-year NASA research grant to Durisen for another scientific project, "The Evolution and Appearance of Young Stellar Disks with Gravitational Instabilities." (See below.)

"NASA's always looking for leverage," said Durisen, who mentioned that another goal of the organization is to involve researchers in education at all levels. "It's not interested in spending money for us to go into just a couple of schools in Indiana. NASA wants us to produce something that reaches out to a wider audience, so we plan in the last year of the grant to disseminate a set of lesson plans or units."

Durisen said that he hopes the new lesson plans challenge sixth-graders to ask larger questions. For example: What makes a planet habitable or not? What are the prospects for finding life on other planets?

"They are wide open questions," the astronomer said, "and ones that stimulate the imagination of people of any age."

Related story