Teaching Resources

Students practice math skills, summarize what we know about the rate of star formation and how common exoplanets are, and debate abstract definitions like "intelligence." Appropriate for high school and introductory college classes.

Requires red, green, and blue filters or cellophane paper. Students use filters to view pictures and infer properties of the objects viewed. Appropriate for middle school, high school, and introductory college classes..

Students use real measurements of CO gas masses to determine star formation rates in near and distant galaxies. They determine that galaxies had higher star formation rates in the past. Appropriate for advanced high school and introductory college classes.

Setup requires fabric, embroidery ring, and several different weight balls (see pic on instructor sheet). Students experiment with how different sized balls warp spacetime and use their observations to determine how gravity works. Powerpoint should be shown after the lab is completed. Appropriate for middle-high school and introductory college classes.

Setup requires colored pencils, a light bulb, spectroscopes, four different gas tubes and electric boxes (good choices are mercury and neon). Students use spectroscopes to view unlabeled gas tubes and light bulb and draw what they see with colored pencils. Then they see examples of real spectra and deduce what gases they viewed. Appropriate for middle-high school and introductory college classes.

This is a remote learning adaptation of The Rainbow Universe lesson (due to Fall 2021 teaching online only). The worksheet contains explicit instructions for how to load real image in the NASA Extragalactic Database and use those images to deduce physical properties of galaxies. Appropriate for introductory courses.

I explicitly teach about bias in all of my classes, since it affects who's achievements we read about in our textbooks. In this exercise, students read various articles and examine primary sources and then answer an essay prompt about why the Nobel Physics Prize is male-dominated. The worksheet contains links to all the necessary articles. Appropriate for high school and college.