Example Syllabus

I chose my goals and objectives as skills and knowledge that students can take away from this course rather than simply things they learn once for a test and forget. They are innovative because they try to draw out the relevance of the skies and astronomy to our everyday lives -- what we experience when we look up and how the tools of science can be learned through Astronomy content and applied elsewhere.

Some additional activities I will use (besides the traditional lecture and test format) to help foster a connection between the real Universe and the class material will be an observing lab and an outside project. The observing lab is already a practice in many introductory astronomy courses but I hope to use it as a method to introduce students to the practice of connecting what they see up there and what they know about celestial navigation. The outside project will be an opportunity for students to apply astronomical principles to their everyday lives. For example, students can choose take a spectrum of a flower and the responses of our eyes' cone cells to understand why it is appears yellow, use polarized sunglasses to study the way light reflects off a lake, calculate the relative distance of light bulbs from their brightness, or test what materials are transparent to infrared light of their TV remote using a digital camera.

Example 1101 Syllabus