The Universe At Your Fingertips

The Universe at Your Fingertips is a key product of Project ASTRO. This loose-leaf notebook contains:

• exemplary classroom activities selected by a team of teachers and astronomers

• comprehensive resource lists and bibliographies

• brief background material on astronomical topics

• teaching ideas from experienced astronomy educators.

The Universe At Your Fingertips Table of Contents
The Universe At Your Fingertips Activities Table of Contents

Preview some sample activities online:

Picture An Astronomer
Cosmic Calendar
Your Astrology Defense Kit

Selected Bibliographies:

Astronomy Education
Women in Astronomy
Debunking Pseudoscience

The Universe at Your Fingertips notebook ($42.95 list price) has been available online at the ASP's AstroShop, but is now out of print. A new and improved disc version, The Universe at Your Fingertips 2.0 DVD-ROM ($29.95 list price), is in production and is expected to be available November 2010.

The Universe at Your Fingertips 2.0 DVD-ROM is a resource and activity guide for those teaching basic concepts in space and earth science. It includes over 130 of the best hands-on astronomy activities, developed by programs and projects around the U.S. -- many with NASA support. It also features over 65 guides to astronomical information and teaching resources, plus 14 short videos with instructions for doing some of the most often used activities. It is -- in a sense -- the "greatest hits" of U.S. astronomy education, designed to help teachers, museum educators, and astronomers who work with them find the most effective way of teaching about our understanding of the universe.

The activities range from brief (less than 15-minute) discussions to sequences that take several class periods, cover a host of topics that are the staple of national and state science frameworks and standards. Themes include scales of size, distance, and time; comparative planetology; understanding basic sky phenomena, such as phases of the Moon, the daily motion of the Sun, the reasons for seasons, and the multi-cultural origins of the constellations; and ways of involving astronomy learning with other fields such as geography, math, writing, and history. Each classroom-tested activity comes with full instructions and connections to key ideas on student learning and science teaching.

The Universe at Your Fingertips began as a loose-leaf notebook of several dozen activities and resource guides, developed for Project ASTRO, a program at the Astronomical Society of the Pacific to train and partner volunteer astronomers with 3rd through 9th grade teachers, and Astronomy from the Ground Up, a project to help science and nature centers do more astronomy. The print version of this notebook was used by thousands of schools, colleges, planetariums, museums, youth groups, and astronomy departments. Now, this greatly expanded -- and much easier to carry -- Universe at Your Fingertips 2.0 DVD-ROM is expected to become a major national resource for those who teach (or work with teachers of) astronomy.

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