Learning Adventure #2

Day four of the process otherwise known as Learning Adventure #2: 

As others have already eluded to - are we to post each step of the process? Not sure so I did not post yesterday but thought I should today. 

I took the program to the students to include a collaborative process to the LA.  They were not interested in participating - again for my teaching environment, these are volunteer participatory opportunities. Tried as I might - I have not been able to connect a learning opportunity directly into our curriculum.  I was intrigued as to why they immediately and concisely decided that they did not what to design a question for this program.  The answer was very consistent - "I'm not interested in astronomy or the 
universe, this would be something that may go better with smaller children." 

Still looking for a group of peers to colloborate with, I took the program to the faculty members (11 of them) that I work with each day.  Again, not interested. Next step was to go to the science teachers on the campus.  Here is where the excitement was found.  I met with two and they were familiar with Celestia and had used it previously in their courses as an outside class assignment. We discussed the directions - both initial and subsequential - given by Gary. They provided me examples of questions they had used in the past that were founded in math and the sciences. We developed a new question that we searched the universe for the answer. 

Again, this assignment provided me with the following learning opportunites: 
1. learning starts with a questions - a reason to seek out knowledge. 
2. whatever learning that is first anticipated - may or may not occur but will provide a vehicle for additional questions and learning opportunities. 
3. possibility the answer(s) to the initial question(s) may not be as revelevent as the learning that occured to get to the answers. 

The wealth of knowledge that I obtained by spending a couple of hours with my peers in the science department outweighed (for me) the answer to our question.