Refining Board Games for the Classroom
Submitted by Michael Fryda on Tue, 2017-04-04 15:56
Here we can see the inner workings of a star.
Just like any curricular set piece, teachers can refine and optimize games to make sure they are meeting their learning objectives. In this article I’d like to share an example with the readers of Spielbound.org from a course that I teach at my school. What decisions did a colleague make to improve the Nuclear Fusion game to maximize student learning?
One of the critical aspects of astronomy instruction at the high school level is to help students to understand where larger elements of the Universe come from. The Big Bang produced largely Hydrogen and Helium. So where do all of the heavier elements that living things use (carbon, oxygen, and iron, to name a few) come from? The short answer is that they are fused from smaller atoms inside the cores of stars. We are literally made of star stuff, as so famously described by Carl Sagan. That fact is all well and good, but professional science educators want and need students to know the process by which this occurs. What is actually happening in the core of that star?
