By William J. Cromie

Gazette Staff

The room held a curious collection of what can best be described as "interesting stuff." There was a wrist sundial made of cardboard, a planetarium projector constructed from a round Quaker Oats box, and a shoebox camera. Scattered around were parts for yet-to-be-made gadgets -- tongue depressors, batteries, coils of wire, nails, and plastic trays used for fast-food takeouts.

Despite the toylike appearance, this stuff represents a revolutionary goal: nothing less than changing the way that physical science is taught in elementary schools. Founders of the project, scientists and educators in the Science Education Department of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA), intend to do this without textbooks. The learning comes from doing a wide range of activities with cheap, simple materials.

"We call the project ARIES, an acronym for Astronomy Resources for Intercurricular Elementary Science," says project director Bruce Ward. "The name is a mouthful but it nicely describes what it is, a curriculum based on astronomy. We chose astronomy because stars, planets, and space travel capture every student's imagination."

"ARIES is not a course in astronomy," adds Irwin Shapiro, director of the CfA. "It's a vehicle to introduce students to physical science through a subject they find engaging, and to link the understanding they gain to other subjects including history, mathematics, art, music, and writing."

The first ARIES module, called "Time," was released last year. It explores how time has been measured throughout history, and the impact of timekeeping on industry and culture.

This month, a second module ends the long journey from concepts to classroom: "Astronomy I: Thinking about the Earth and Sun." It will help kids realize why Earth has day, night, and seasons. Using inexpensive materials, students build their own compasses, telescopes, and simple devices to track movements of the sun and Earth.

Other modules in the development stage will cover various types of waves, sunlight and energy, and navigation.

"There's no question that kids are learning more science with ARIES than they did before," says Tom Etre, a teacher at Franklin School in Newton, Mass. "We've adapted an ARIES program for third and fourth grades, and teachers, students, and parents are very pleased with it. It produces a level playing field in the sense that both boys and girls participate equally. Girls quickly get involved in science, something I had not seen much in the past."

Teaching Teachers

ARIES is designed as much for teachers as for students. "Most elementary teachers are least-prepared and least-comfortable in the area of physical science," Shapiro says. "They do not feel as confident explaining fundamental ideas as they do teaching biology and other subjects. Our curriculum tries to motivate them to strengthen their understanding, skills, and creativity in physical science."

Teachers from all over the country participate in the development and field testing of ARIES. To date, it has been tested in 75 schools nationwide. Plans call for training new teachers to use the module at 30 "Challenger centers" in the U.S. and Canada. These centers were named for the 1986 space shuttle disaster which took the lives of the six astronauts and Christa McAuliffe, the first teacher selected for a space flight. "Flight directors" -- teachers who work at the centers -- attend summer courses to learn to present ARIES workshops at locations like the Christa McAuliffe Center at Framingham State College in Massachusetts.

Teachers use the material in the third to sixth grades. In the Time module, for example, students learn to measure time by observing shadows outdoors. They make a shadow stick out of a plaster-of-Paris disk and a drinking straw. The gadget allows them to keep track of daily and seasonal movements of the sun much the way people did 3,000 years ago.

Each child makes his or her own wrist sundial from cardboard and two small squares of Velcro. "It's a very popular item," Ward says. "Kids love to show them to their families, and that often gets their parents involved. They grasp the concepts involved much better than if the teacher just speaks to them or demonstrates a sundial."

A sundial works only in a limited range of latitudes and is useless on cloudy days, so students follow history and make water clocks. Water clocks have a long, rich history from about 1000 B.C. to 1400 A.D. The common expression "flow of time" comes from such clocks, which preceded the sand variety.

Students also learn how to keep time with the help of the regular motion of a pendulum. Galileo first noted this possibility when he timed a swinging chandelier by using his pulse. Such lessons combine the excitement of discovery and establish links to other subjects including literature and history.

"Kids learn best from their own discoveries and hands-on participation, not from memorizing facts," notes Marvin Grossman, associate director of the project. "ARIES provides this."

World in a Shoebox

The Astronomy I module that debuts this month also takes advantage of shadows to show how Earth's position changes relative to the sun. "We thought hard about how to teach astronomy in daytime without relying on lectures and slides," Grossman notes.

The ARIES team came up with a shoebox in which a rubber ball is fixed on an axis stick tilted at the same angle as Earth as it revolves around the sun during the year. A flashlight beam shown through a hole in the box simulates the sun. Students imagine they are on the Earth ball, then answer questions such as when will day become night, and how long does it take the Earth to rotate to the same position again?

Ward says an astronomy shoebox can be purchased from a supplier for about $2.50, a cost low enough to allow most school systems to buy one for each student. Even if the boxes must be re-used, children can still take them home and get their parents involved. "Kids love to impress parents and siblings with their knowledge of astronomy," he declares.

"We use kits in the classroom all the time, but at the end of the day students leave them behind," Etre points out. "In this program, kids do assignments with them at home and parents get involved. That thrills the kids."

For an Astronomy II unit, the ARIES team constructed a planetarium projector from a round cereal box. Students punch holes in the box in patterns that represent star positions. A small, battery-powered light inside the box projects these "stars" onto the ceiling and walls of a dark room.

Grossman, who conceived the idea, calculates that students can punch as many as 300 stars into their personal projectors. He is working on a yoke mechanism to permit the cylindrical box to be turned in a way to simulate the movement of stars from one season to the next.

There's no end to the creativity of the ARIES bunch. Their science toys include a compass made with a magnet and stuff you'd find in the kitchen junk drawer, a mailing-tube telescope with a plastic lens, a pinhole camera, and a periscope.

For the Sunlight and Energy module, the team wanted a meter to measure the relative energies associated with different intensities of light. Such custom-made instruments are expensive, so the ARIES team put one together with a magnet, a coil of wire, a hat pin, and a film can. When they demonstrate this simple light meter to visitors, most people express surprise at how sensitive it is to changes in light.

Shapiro began thinking about the need for a project like ARIES as long ago as 1982. He looked through the text his daughter used for her high-school chemistry course and was "horrified at the huge number of advanced concepts thrown one after another at students. It was clear to me that a whole new approach to teaching science was needed, starting in elementary school."

In 1989, Ward had lunch with Philip Sadler, now director of the Science Education Department. Ward received his Ed.D. from Harvard the year before, and Sadler suggested that he work on a project for teaching physical science to elementary students using astronomy as a hook. Ward, Grossman, and Shapiro got together and wrote a proposal to the National Science Foundation (NSF), which funded the project in 1992.

If a more recent proposal is fully funded, ARIES will receive about $3.2 million in NSF support until early 1999.

"We are still working on an official assessment, but teachers have been reporting that both they and the students are engaged and excited," Ward says. "The teachers say that they are getting involved in their own learning. The students are having fun while they enhance their reasoning skills and learn some of the basic ideas of science."