Welcome to the MS Computer Lab Blog!
The objective of our blog is to share information about how we integrate our technology curriculum into the subject area curriculum. The foundation of this effort is the methodology of team teaching the lessons with the Middle School subject area teachers. Each post describes a particular lesson, the software used, some of the skills that were targeted, and the number of days that were spent in the lab.
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Friday, May 29, 2009
Exoplanets, Excel and Filemaker Pro
The 6th grade Science students created a database, into which they imported information about exoplanets that they accessed from an online database. The Extrasolar Planets Encyclopaedia The students did various sorts and multiple criteria finds in order to analyze which exoplanets were most similar to the Earth. Later on, they went to another online database Catalog of Nearby Exoplanets and downloaded a text file that they cleaned up and then imported into Filemaker. With this data, the students compared the mass of each exoplanet with the amount of wobble its star exhibited and from that, they were able to draw conclusions about the relationship between these two factors. This lesson took five class periods to complete.
