By Stacy Palen

Sometimes, “learning by doing” requires the use of a model or a simulation. It’s not possible for students to go into space far above Earth’s North Pole, or to change the mass of a planet and see how it affects the behavior of the central star.

There are loads of simulations and animations available online. So many, in fact, that it can be bewildering to find what you need, and it can be even more complicated to troubleshoot technology to figure out why one of your students can’t access the resources while another can’t see all the buttons.

Gradually, we’ve been working to create a stable set of straightforward simulations and animations that support the Exploration activities at the end of every chapter of Understanding Our Universe and 21^st Century Astronomy. Many of these Explorations are guided inquiry experiments that use one of the interactive simulations or animations.

For example, in Chapter 12, students are guided through an investigation of the H-R Diagram using an interactive graph. When students move the cursor along the track of the evolution of a low-mass star, they can predict and then see the changes in the star. This helps them develop an intuition for the properties of stars in different regions of the H-R Diagram, and helps them learn how stars like the Sun evolve after they leave the main sequence.

Explorations using simulations or animations have pre-built assignments in SmartWork that include hints for difficult questions, and prompt students to explore the interactive graphs in more detail. It’s easy to assign these activities as a unit or as individual questions. You could also write your own questions in SmartWork or in your LMS (such as Canvas), which reference the simulations or animations that your students access through SmartWork.

I didn’t have “online teaching in a global pandemic” in mind when I created this feature. It was “just” something that I did with my classes when I had the luxury of teaching in a tech-enabled classroom. But I routinely assign Exploration activities as part of my students’ online homework. And I suspect I’ll be doing even more of this over the next few semesters!