Abstract

In Brazil, the Common National Curriculum Base (BNCC) foresees the teaching of astronomy concepts in all elementary school years. In the final years (8th and 9th grade), different skills address the knowledge of the occurrence of the phases of the Moon, eclipses, the origin of the stars, the composition and structure of the Solar System, calendars, the viability of life on other planets, etc. In this context, we proposed a school activity for students to carry out a long-term experiment involving data collection and analysis of results to better understand the Moon’s cycle and trajectory. The project, scheduled to take place in 2020, had to be adapted due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The school adopted emergency distance learning based in virtual classes. Several adaptations to the face-to-face proposal were made, mainly because the investigation would be carried out in the students’ homes, turning the activity into “teaching beyond the screens.” We have developed the activity in a Brazilian private school in São Paulo city since 2021, including all students (approximately 350) in the 9th grade of elementary school. Over the years, we adapted the activity proposed by Lago et al. (2018) during the school’s STEM course classes. Our proposal is based on the premises of the Problem-Based Learning (PBL) approach and also Teaching by Investigation. Both approaches have the student as the protagonist, the one who realizes the activity for a month in order to understand the Moon and the Sun movement around the Earth. The activity consists of observing the position of the Moon at a fixed time over 30 days using the Skywalk2 app. In a homeroom that serves as a reference, post-its are used to indicate the positions of the Moon and Sun. Students record all pertinent information in a notebook, including the precise time of each observation of the Moon’s phases. At the end, students are required to prepare a report with the findings regarding the Moon’s phases, considering the Sun-Earth-Moon relative positions in each phase, the times the Moon appeared in the sky, etc. The project has been improved to expand the students’ experience and promote further reflection on practice and critical analysis of results. For example, aspects do not present in the original proposal were included, such as choosing the observation time, marking the position of the Sun over 15 days, and writing a scientific report at the end of the process to organize the procedures, results, and conclusions. When the activity finished, we identified that the goal of promoting spatial understanding of the Moon’s trajectory and its relationship with its phases had been achieved. This evaluation is based on the analysis of student’s reports and their family members obtained while the activity was being carried out. In addition, it is possible to verify the complexification of the student’s experiment reporting texts and the better performance in the written evaluation. It is also observed that the activity is perturbative, requiring the reorganization of family dynamics since students use different rooms in their homes as a reference.

Authors: Renato Pacheco Villar, Thais Costella, Mariana Peão Lorenzin, Cristiano Mattos

Published in: World Congress on Education (2024)

  • Date of Conference: 26-28 August, 2024
  • DOI: 10.20533/WCE.2024.0032
  • Electronic ISBN: 978-1-913572-71-6
  • Conference Location: Churchill College, Cambridge, UK

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