In Earth and Cosmos students have moved into Module 2 considering the question ‘What’s out there?’
We began by taking a historical look at this question, understanding that the Space Race arose out of the competition between the Soviet Union and the United States of America to be the first to venture to space. This includes understanding the social and political contexts around this, recognising the huge amounts of science and technological innovations that developed, and the opportunities around the ‘hidden figures’ that broke glass ceilings during this time such as Katherine Johnson, Mary Jackson, Dorothy Vaughan and Valentina Tereshkova.
Students are also applying their trigonometry skills to investigate mathematical questions relating to identifying the locations of objects in space. This has been undertaken by calculating the relative distances of the sun and moon and using stellar parallax to determine the distance of Proxima Centuri from Earth.
Moving forward, students will be analysing text excerpts from Hidden Figures from language and stylistic features, social and historical contexts, and science as a human endeavour lenses. We then consider the future for space innovation by replicating and exploring NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirect Test (DART) (2021) using Sphero robots and basic coding to put our trigonometry calculations into practice.
Stay tuned Houston!