Lessons from visionary Johannes Kepler

This week, we returned to the project we started before Christmas. We used the calculations we did to map out the orbital shapes of the planets. We used principles originally explained by Johannes Kepler to measure out the distance between the two foci. We then used our measurements to cut string to the right length so that we could draw the elliptical orbits. We worked together to map out a couple of the planets to see the differences in the shapes and discuss what those differences mean.

Then, we watched a couple key parts of a Ted Talk about extra-terrestrial life. We identified the three ingredients needed to support life and talked about one planet and two moons that likely have all three ingredients. We modeled these three ingredients using a yeast demonstration that another group had done in a lesson previous to Christmas. This demo allows us to see what happens when those three ingredients are available, and it allows us to test out various other conditions. The students in this lesson also began to wonder what would happen under other conditions that we did not test.