Abstract: This workshop will motivate and implement teaching with student smartphones in the introductory astronomy classroom. These devices are extremely prevalent in today’s society and our students have a very strong devotion to them. Smartphones offer a unique opportunity to forge connections between students and science content.
We will then detail the desirable characteristics of HTML5 simulations targeted at smartphones and examples illustrating these characteristics. Participants will manipulate a smartphone simulation as a student and another as an instructor, formulating a plan for guiding their students in its usage. Special emphasis will be placed on exploring the characteristics of stars on the HR Diagram and stellar evolutionary paths.
We will also demonstrate formative assessment tools that include ranking, sorting, and labeling tasks and provide publicly available authoring tools. Participants will complete tasks from astronomy and astrobiology and participate in a discussion of different usage methodologies.
It is expected that participants will have a smartphone in hand that they will be putting to work accessing astronomy content through QR codes. All materials used are publicly available at the University of Nebraska Astronomy Education website at https://astro.unl.edu.
