Open Your Eyes to the Skies: An Innovative and Interdisciplinary Astronomy/Astrochemistry Teaching Laboratory

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Astronomy (11) This project is creating a multi-use teaching laboratory in the historic University of Illinois Observatory building (a National Historic Landmark) that allows students to use the 12 inch Brashear refracting telescope (completed in 1896) and a suite of smaller telescopes together with spectrographs, laboratory experiments, and computer-based activities such as data analysis. In addition, the project is developing an ensemble of undergraduate courses that utilize the Observatory in a new way to better promote science education with a hands-on, active learning approach. Two of these courses target non-astronomy majors who take the introductory astronomy courses to satisfy their quantitative reasoning university requirement. A third course targets astronomy majors, who otherwise get very little exposure to real observing and experimentation. The fourth course is the nation's first laboratory course in the emerging interdisciplinary field of astrochemistry. Intellectual Merit: The work involves the creation of an innovative teaching laboratory in the disciplines of astronomy and astrochemistry, as well as the development of new courses for non-astronomy majors, astronomy majors, and chemistry majors. The PIs are creating new learning materials and teaching strategies in the form of the laboratory "manuals" for these courses, which are deliberately vague enough to force the students to explore the scientific questions at hand and to develop their own experimental techniques. The project is also implementing educational innovations based on successful astronomy laboratory courses (e.g., Harvard and UC Berkeley), but also advancing their achievements with the powerful addition of astronomical spectroscopy and astrochemistry. Broader Impact: The creation of an astronomy/astrochemistry teaching laboratory, and the development of the associated courses, takes advantage of the opportunity presented by the Observatory and students' natural wonder, to open up their eyes to the skies in a new way. The broader impact of this work will be a more scientifically literate population (resulting from non-majors' exposure to the scientific method), a larger and more gender-balanced population of astronomy majors, and better-educated scientists in chemistry and astronomy entering the workforce. The project can also benefit other U.S. astronomy departments.