Teaching Astronomy by Doing Astronomy

By Stacy Palen

The phases of the Moon are one of those topics that has been extensively studied by the astronomy education research community and is well-known to be more complex than most people think. There’s the change of perspective from Earth-view to space-view. There are multiple motions at once (the rotation of Earth and the Moon, and the revolution of the Moon around Earth). There’s the issue about light rays always traveling in straight lines and not bending. It’s complicated.

Last week, I pulled an old phases-of-the-Moon activity out of the archives, which can be accessed by clicking here, for my students to complete in addition to the activity, “Studying the Phases of the Moon” from the Learning Astronomy by Doing Astronomy workbook. This is not an appropriate activity for Learning Astronomy by Doing Astronomy because it requires students to have Styrofoam balls that have been colored black on one half. (I can’t make the classroom dark, so I can’t use the traditional “balls-on-sticks” approach.) But one thing that I like very much about this activity is that it leads them to figure out how to (approximately) tell time by the Moon, which means that I can ask them a question about it on my zombie-apocalypse midterm—insert evil laugh here!

The activity also asks them to consider the phases of other objects, such as the phases of Earth as seen from the Moon, or the phases of Deimos as seen from Mars or Phobos. Carrying the concept of phases away from Earth seems to help cement the idea that this is a phenomenon that is all about the relative location of the light source and the observer.

I followed this activity the next week with the “Studying the Phases of the Moon” activity from the workbook. I was interested to notice that students finished the activity in record time and were much better prepared for it. The two activities worked well together to really build their picture of how the phases of the Moon actually occur.